What do you factual knowledge do you possess that you are surprised that more people are clueless about?
The one thing I feel I’ve done more than my share of explaining is the 1st/2nd/3rd cousins one/twice/etc., removed relationship(s). Wiki explanation here if your among the hordes of the uninformed (along with other interesting info like double cousins, half cousins, that was news to me).
Got any good ones?
It should go without saying that opinion and politics are not encouraged here ;).
I know those genealogical relationships like you do. I once figured out the relationship between me and a man who was an important gov’t figure in the 1880’s. We were both descendants of a man who came to the American colonies in 1722.
We are third cousins, five times removed!
My maternal grandmother had double cousins, as two brothers and a sister married two sisters and a brother in her parents generation.
As a sidebar to that I can name, in order, all the monarchs of England/the UK/ Great Britain, since 1066. And I know how they were related to each other. It’s helped me win trivia contests, but not much else.
I used to impress an old manager of mine by having knowledge of the recent-past’s pop culture.
He was floored that someone “of my generation” knew the likes of Paul Lynde, HR Pufinstuf, The Electric Company and stuff like that. I don’t know much about them, but I could recognize a reference or put in a joke about them.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that 90% of my knowledge of those things comes from Family Guy…
I’ve gotten in to 3 different arguments within the past 6 months with people who insist that Slovakia and Slovenia are the same place, who don’t think the Czechs and Slovaks are different people and now they even have different countries, and are shocked that Bohemia is inside the Czech Republic No Not Czechoslovakia I Mean The Czech Republic.
It’s not like I’m a scholar. I literally was just interested in the region, as I am Slovak, and took time to read the Wikipedia articles and look at maps. Pisses me off that these arguments were with other people of Slavic descent and they were completely clueless.
Concrete and cement are not synonyms; cement is one component of concrete. Concrete is made up of water, cement, aggregates, and admixtures. sigh Even folks in the construction industry, who should know better, use the wrong nomenclature.
The first/second/etc cousins ones always surprises me, too. I mean, it’s not like it really matters or anything, but it’s also not really that complicated and can sometimes really be a useful distinction. I find a lot of people skip the cousin thing altogether and just go by age. When my first cousin once removed had a baby recently, I went to meet him and was constantly referred to as his aunt.
It’s amazing how often this fallacy keeps getting perpetuated. Lifting surfaces work solely by angle of attack. End of. Even Einstein believed in this fundamental error when he designed his ‘cat’s back’ airfoil. When a test flight of his airfoil included an unintended roll immediately after takeoff :eek: , he had this to say:
I’m always surprised at how few people know what I’m talking about when I bring up grackles, which are as ubiquitous as crows. They’re freaking everywhere, how can people not know what they are?
I would guess it’s because to people who don’t care enough to look it up they’re just birds.
“Spring officially starts on March 20” (in the USA). There isn’t an ‘official’ start date of spring or any other season.
You’d be surprised how many people I’ve had to teach to tie their shoes properly. Many people tie them with the equivalent of a granny knot, which explains why their shoes keep coming untied. I realized why my shoes kept coming untied when I was in my mid-twenties and re-taught myself, and if you show the slightest interest, I’m happy to expound on the subject for a good ten minutes or so.
I have no idea how I learned about it, but it seems like I have always known how some traffic lights work. Not the lights so much, but how some are triggered.
Most of them are migrating to a camera system, but there are still some that have sensors in the ground that sense a vehicle on top and trigger the light to change. The cameras and the ground sensors are normally in front of the painted line on the road. When you pull up to the intersection and stop before the white line, the sensor or the camera is triggered and the light will start the process to change. I see so many people who either stop so far before the painted line that the sensor or camera doesn’t pick it up. There are several people who also pull past the line and stop just short of the cross walk line, (blocking the cross walk), that they are no longer on the sensor. Both will not trigger the light and they will have to sit there until someone pulls onto a sensor in another lane.
It’s common usage for the solstices and equinoxes. If someone asked, when is the first day of spring, you would really say “there isn’t one”?
No, I would answer “March 20,” because I don’t get into public disagreements.
**How to quickly get ketchup from a newly opened glass bottle. **(some conventions first: “bottom” is the surface of the bottle that it sits on at rest; “top” is the opening where ketchup comes out; and “sides” are the vertical or nearly-vertical surfaces when the bottle is sitting at rest.)
Most people turn the bottle upside-down and start smacking the bottom of the bottle. But at the narrow throat near the top, the small free surface of the thick, gooey ketchup is pretty stable; you’re relying on a random tiny instability to grow with your percussive efforts until ketchup flows down one side and air flows up the other. This can take a while.
Solution: orient the bottle sideways in one hand, and smack it down into the palm of your other hand a few times (for best results, your free hand should strike the neck of the bottle rather than the body). Ketchup will accumulate on one side of the bottle’s neck, and air will accumulate on the other side. Now tip the bottle 45 degrees down and start shaking, and air will readily flow into the bottle and ketchup will flow out.
**How to wear a bicycle helmet. **Check out the next ten bicycle riders you see; chances are nearly all of them will have their helmet tipped back on their head, leaving their forehead dangerously exposed. This is a part of your head that is very likely to hit the pavement if you crash, so if you’re wearing a helmet to protect your head (pretty much the entire point), wear it right.
I watch Jeopardy pretty regularly, and I’m amazed at how little people know about geography. But then, Geography is not something you learn a lot about from casual reading, and the news media treats geography like arcana, assuming nobody understands it so just skip it. People who know a fair amount of geography are usually people who are old enough to have been exposed to lots of places. Our two closest neighbors, the news anchor will report something that took place “in Mexico”, but never any reference to where in Mexico, which has 31 states. Mexico is just treated like Kazakhstan or Zambia, some nebulous country beyond our borders. Credit where due, they usually narrow down “in Canada” to a province.
Years ago, newscasts would super a map with arrows on it, to locate a country they are reporting about, but they don’t even deign to do that anymore. But they usually sasy what continent it is on. The day Qaddafi overthrew King Idris of Libya, the I heard the news media call Libya “a tiny oil-rich kingdom”, which the international desk hadn’t had the chance to look up on a map yet.
Good man.
It’s only a little annoying that people think the vernal equinox is the first day of spring. It is tremendously annoying when they say it’s the official first day of spring.
The US NWS says spring is March thru May. So officially, in the US, it’s actually March 1st.
Now, don’t start me on “blue moon”.
To expound (don’t know if it’s mentioned in that link), wearing a hat or kerchief under your helmet, like so many people do, negates its effectiveness. The material will cause slippage of the helmet upon impact. That plastic strip is there to provide gription so the helmet won’t slide.
I’m shocked by how few people seem to know how to open a bottle of wine with a shoe! The number of times* I’ve had to step in when there’s no corkscrew, and people are trying to messily bash the cork into :eek: the bottle, I dunno, it’s barbaric.