Oh, I’ve heard that a number of times. Try being in the American church some time. The simple fact is that most people are by definition not that bright, considering that by definition “bright” means “noticibly smarter than most people”. Or as I’m fond of pointing out, “Half the population is below the median intelligence.”
If your average person isn’t making an effort to learn about a detailed subject, they’re almost bound to have vast misperceptions, especially if they’ve been told to presume a certain conclusion, like so many American christians have.
In my 7th or 8th grade history class we were studying about Egypt one day. Our books were all open to a page that had a picture of the Pyramids on it. One girl piped up, saying, “Look at those funny mountains!”
Not to mention that if the damage was to the actual stomach, damage from its acids to the rest of the guts would be… best described by gabriela
And a puncture to the intestines would lead to sepsis… and another visit to gabriela. Sort of like a very fast case of peritonitis. Surviving a knife wound to an extremity that doesn’t manage to perforate an artery is a lot easier than surviving a knife wound to the gut (again, without any arteries involved).
This is probably more ignorance than stupidity, but:
I have a relative who insists that turbulence experienced on an aircraft is caused by the plane hitting “air pockets”, which she describes as huge “bubbles of vacuum” in the air. According to her, when the airplane flies through one of these “bubbles”, it drops a little and the roughness is caused by the plane slamming into the air again on the other side of the “bubble”.
I had been exchanging daily emails with a friend. We both had hotmail addresses, but after, several days of not being able to access my mail during peak hours and an ungodly amount of spam, I told her I was switching to yahoo, then gave her my yahoo address so she would recognize it and not delete it as spam.
After a few days of not receiving any replies from her, I figured she was having trouble accessing her hotmail. Then one evening, I caught her on AOL IM and asked if she had received my emails. She said “no”, and she had checked every day.
Me: “I guess I’ll go back to using my hotmail address then.”
Her: “That’s too bad that yahoo didn’t work. I only signed up to their mail because I was expecting your emails. But now I like them better than hotmail, and haven’t even tried to log on to hotmail in days.” :dubious:
To be fair, most of these are easily explained as simple ignorance, bordering on the somewhat addle-brained I’ll admitt.
1. Viet Nam and Korea are actually the same country
A simple missunderstanding: both countries are far away, people there look different from “us” and similar to each other (I realize I’m assuming things about what this woman looks like: please ignore if this does not apply) and they both speak Goobledygook (the official language of the largest nation on earth, “Foreign Places”). If someone in dead seariousness told me this, I’d hesitate to correct them, beacuse geography bores me out of my skull, and there might easily be some gaping chasm in my knowledge. And I’m not stupid, just (in this case) ignorant. I don’t think theire the same country, though, just to make that clear.
2. Egypt was part of Europe
What’s the problem? “Egypt” was part of “Europe” several times. Not in modern times though…
3. the Queen of England was elected
England and her neighbours have had a lot of queens, and some of the were elected. Maybe she just misunderstood something on History Channel?
4. airplanes only fly because they have engines (I didn’t even want to figure out what she would think about sailplanes and hang gliders)
Exept she wasn’t talking about sailplanes and hanggliders, she was talking about airplanes. If you take away the engines on an airplane, its not going to fly, is it?
I realice there is there is more to flying airplanes than engines, but why should someone not interested in physics or airplanes know this?
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5. if you were the recipient of a heart transplant you will have the memories of the donor and fall in love with whoever they loved (because we say, “I love you with all my heart”)*
Common enough superstition. Like believing four-leaf clover are lucky.
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Yes, I’m bored, can you tell?
Ehhhhh it depends on how strictly you define “Airplane”. If you arbitrarily limit it to powered fixed-wing heavier than air vehicles, then yeah, airplanes usually* need engines to fly.
*I have heard stories about small private planes, tethered to the ground, sorta hovering in place at their tethers in strong winds. While I have serious questions as to whether a tethering line would actually hold under those circumstances, it’s theoretically possible at least.
That said, even powered fixed-wing aircraft and helicoptors can fly without engines for relatively limited distances, if the pilot knows what he’s doing. They usually have serious issues in regards to gaining altitude for any meaningful length of time though.
Egypt has never been part of Europe. It may have had much more to do politically with Europe than North Africa, but it has never been part of Europe.
Do you consider North America to have been part of Europe while it was British territory?
The Bernoulli principle is really, really basic applied physics and anyone with a twelve-year-old’s education should at least understand it, if not know what it’s called.
There’s definitly a point where “ignorance” and “stupidity” meet. My mom worked with a woman once, American born and a high school graduate, who didn’t know who Adolf Hitler was. Now, not knowing a particular historical figure is ignorance, but to have made it all the way to adulthood in the US in the 1980s (when my mom knew the woman) without ever picking up on the importance of the man who started the biggest war in the history of humanity… that takes a fair amount of stupid to accomplish.
“A period of complexity in musical style is usually followed by a period of simplicity.”
A period of complexity HAS to be followed by period of simplicity. Otherwise the period of complexity hasn’t ended yet. He said it as though it was some sort of profound observation on how music evolves, but it’s the equivalent of saying “The black stripes on a zebra aren’t white.” It’s an absurdly trivial observation.
Granted it’s not as stupid as not knowing where Canada is, but this came out of the mouth of a tenured music professor while he was talking about his primary research topic. It was the first inkling my wife had (later bourne out by other incidents) that this guy was an idiot.
I was in SE Asia with a high school teacher who must have asked me three or four times if we were taking the bus or the train to Indonesia (from Thailand!). A teacher. It was shocking to me.
Then, the entire time we were in Bali she pronounced the capital, every imaginable way but correctly, it was astounding.
The singularly stupidest thing I repeatedly hear people say is, when they overhear you discussing books usually, they volunteer, " I don’t read." I have to bite my tongue to keep from quoting Mark Twain to them; " A man who does not read is scarcely and better off than a man who can’t read." I don’t, but I always think it.
Depends on how you look at it. Since complexity and simplicity are extremes, it’s possible for something to be smack dab in the middle, being neither particulary complex nor simple. So isn’t it possible for a period of complexity to be followed by something that exists in this middle zone? I would think so.
The question would be absurd if complexity is only defined by its polar opposite. “A period of complexity has to be followed by a period of RELATIVE simplicity” would be a stupid statement. But I think when it comes to music, complexity and simplicity can be used as absolute terms.