Heh. The SO and I sat in Bennigan’s last week for an hour after seeing the last Harry Potter and I explained my entire Voldemort-James Potter-Snape theory to him (which I won’t go into in detail here), and then we ARGUED about it and debated it from the time we got our drinks until the time we left (actually, in between the servers and managers apologizing for crappy service, but that was a Pit thread already). I can only imagine what the elderly couple next to us thought when they heard me say loudly to the SO “But even if Harry ISN’T related to Voldemort somehow, there’s SOMETHING there, whether you believe it or not! And no, I do NOT think Hermione is Harry’s twin sister, so would you knock it off about that?”
Just last night, my roommate blanked on the names and spent half an hour arguing with me over whether one could get Ebola from eating undercooked meat. We actually dragged out the dictionary because both of us had tip-of-the-tongue syndrome when it came to E. Coli.
I once argued with my uncle about the time space continuum of RL, and whether a rip in it would cause time to repeat itself or destroy the eartha as we know it. I think it lasted a good twenty minutes and it was interesting to me. at least, what I can remember of it is.
My friend and I, who were extremely bored, once spent an entire class arguing whether the sky was purple, but that was more of a random thing to pass time.
If we’re arguing about who’s the strongest, I got into a heated debate (awhile ago, so don’t judge me) with two guys when they were making up the hardest question for a TV pop culture reference for this Jeopardy-like game at a camp fair. First of all, “Who’s the strongest character in the DBZ series?” isn’t a hard question at all, given that I knew it, and all of my knowledge comes from watching cartoons with my brother, and second of all because their answer was Vegeto, the Kai-earing-fused form of Vegeta and Goku, who is technically two people. I argued that Goku at high highest super saiyan level was the strongest. I was right of course.
I’ve also done the movie!Superhero versus comic!superhero thing.
Draelin, I think I’m going to have to shy away from the SDMB for a while. Every post of yours I read is bringing me that much closer to building a mini shrine in your honor. Unfortunately, what with play rehearsals and my daughter’s karate classes I do not currently have sufficient hours in my schedule to dedicate the time that the nightly devotions (burning of incense, singing of dithyrambs, sacrifices of small stuffed animals) would demand.
Don’t remember the details, but it was probably something along the lines of whether Decepticons Are Evil For The Sake Of Being Evil vs. Decepticons Are “Evil” Because They Are Misunderstood Brave Individualists Chafing Under The Repressive Rule Of A Stagnant Autobot Utopia.
But didn’t Gandalf leave a letter with Butterbur for them just after he met Radagast, so it must have been before? Gandalf was supposed to have turned up ages ago and got them to Rivendell before the Riders appeared, and the reason he didn’t was that he met Radagast. Wasn’t it?
Is it possible to gut-load an innocent bystander with holy water and feed them to a vampire? If so, is this inevitably an evil act?
If you cast detect evil on a baby, and it comes up positive, ought you kill the baby?
Geeky word arguements:
My husband and I once almost came to blows over whether or not “summa cum laude” implied an exclusive superlative, and hence was being diluted and misapplied when awarded to anyone other than the valedictorian. One of use argued that “with highest honors” has to mean “with the highest honors in the group” and the other argued that it simply meant “with the highest honors possible”, which many people might obtain.
Thanks for the responses, folks. You’ve really cheered me up.
Me and my gaming group have since smoothed things over, so we should be fine until the next stupid rule interpretation bruhaha comes up.
I’ll mention this: 20 years ago I was running a high level D&D campaign, and the demigod of death, a big bad NPC, killed my roommate’s character with an arrow of slaying. This being high level D&D, the guy was back up practically the next round, but 20 years later he STILL bitches about it every time he sees me.
Whether reverse Polish notation is faster than algebraic notation, followed by a speed test. FYI, this is an argument over whether one calculator is faster than another.
That was the result we got. Most people learned to do math using algebraic notation, so RPN seems intuitively slower, until you get used to it. (Did I mention that I miss my HP 15c calculator, which I lost a few years ago?)
My family is a regular geek family. We’ve had so many, but none specifically come to mind. My dad usually loses by misremembering several things. I hate the ones where you try to decide whether a given object is bluish purple or purplish blue.
This is lame, but it could have become a full-on argument if my math teacher wasn’t so stubborn. I think the problem was something like
log[sub]2[/sub]x[sup]3x-1[/sup] = log[sub]3/sub[sup]2x[/sup]
I can’t remember what I did now, but my way was clearly simpler, though hers worked as well. I think I read somewhere that “nobody in their right mind would ever use a log in any base other than 2 or e” and that’s what made me do it my way. She just wanted to believe her way was “right” even though I’d just shown the rest of my group my way, and they all agreed with me.
Is this like when you have sqrt(1+sin 10) and you enter it on some calculators as
1, 0, sin, +, 1, [sqrt]
and on others as
[sqrt], 1, +, sin, 1, 0
?
Is the argument over which is faster for a human to input, or which a calculator can solve faster? If the latter, the hp calculator wins because it solves pieces of the problem as it goes, instead of all at once, right?
I made what I thought a clever and reasonable comment (“I’ll never pass as a Canadian, because I can’t get the ‘eh?’ right. Ironically, though, I can pronounce ‘shibboleth’”). A two-hour argument over the definition of the word “shibboleth” ensued. Dictionaries, bibles, and webpages were consulted, and the first two may have occasionally been thrown; the argument itself might not have been that geeky, but the vitriol it inspired was.
I spent four hours in a bar arguing over whether making code maintainable counts as “optimizing”. On another night, several friends debated the merits of TCP/IP against IPX/SPX.
There’s the great astronauts v. cavemen debate…but I wasn’t part of that one.
The same group of friends argued over how much longer we would have lived if we moved from LA to the equator (due to special relativity).
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever had a shrine built to me … you go right ahead. I will grace you with my divine posting as often as possible, but by no means should you disrupt your full life with your adoration. Continue on as you are, and let the stuffed animals cavort and scamper in my honor.
Whether the GI Joe episode in which the Joes were transported to an giant gold Egyptian space ankh and sacrified themselves to save each other was really a subtle commentary on Judeo-Christian faith and nihilism, or a covert attempt by the writers to turn children into demoralized consumers, or just the same 22 minutes of claptrap slapped together to get another episode out the door.
You mean most recently, right? I don’t even want to begin contemplating the geekiest arguments I’ve been involved with.
Last week I got into a huge argument with a fellow guitarist friend of mine about whether he should put flat wound (i.e., jazz) or round-wound (i.e., normal) strings on his craptacular pawn shop special Japanese hollowbody electric he got through eBay. This involved invoking detailed differences between jazz and rockabilly guitars, usage of a vibrato tailpiece, wood used for guitar body, studio recording requirements for silent strings, chord types, amplifier types and a whole mess of other random bullshit. And it was his guitar and he could do whatever he wanted and he made that clear the entire time.
I still won - he put on the round wounds and it sounds great.
What, exactly, the mechanism is to power a TIE fighters ion engines (no, I don’t have the SW technology books, I’m not that big a nerd, tho’ I do know they exist and have paged through them) and what sort of crystal (and how many) is used to focus a light sabre.
Ye gods, but when it comes out it comes out strong, doesn’t it.
Snicks
