Questions you thought were too stupid to ask

[rorybbellows]

Who was the first president of America?

http://www.marshallhall.org/hanson.html

Ah heavens damergatroyed,I was just trying to catch someone out,but the guru is just to clever.

RORY

[fel bautista]

Who was the first president of America?

http://www.marshallhall.org/hanson.html

You showed me how the whistle part would work with Maudabawn Chapel and now this. Is there no end to your talents???

Happy new year folks!!!!!

[falkbeer]

I'll start:

Why do you folks on the other side of the pond use 'stone' to describe a measure of 14 lbs?
is it really easier to say something weighed 70 stone instead of 980lbs?

I suggest switching to the metric system all together!
The SI-system is superior in every aspect, and is used in most countries and in science.

But the United States' system is used by the most socio-economically powerful country the world has ever seen, so that's why it's still in use despite the metric system being more efficient and used over a wider geographical area. In exporting American culture, this one aspect is just a tiny bit that, for whatever reason(s), seems not to have taken hold (Myanmar and Liberia apparently don't use the metric system, either, for what it's worth).

My question:

The SI-system IS actually in use in the U.S. in the scientific community and in som way in everyday life too (example: a kilo of cocain) . For example, second, volt, ampere and watt are all SI-units. But ofcourse few people knows that a watt is 1 joule per second. 1 volt x 1 ampere is 1 watt too! And I think very few americans persists with the cumbersoms inch-system when it comes to very small measurements such as nanometers (what´s a micrometer in inchs?). Very encouraging is also that columbian drug dealers seems to measure thier goods in kilos (kg). kg is the basic unit and not a gram even though kilogram means 1000 grams. The mass of 1 kg is based on the international kilogram prototype in Paris, present there are no other definition of mass.

[Redwolf]

Next you'll be telling us it's "more sensible" to write the date with the month first, then the day of the month and then the year. Get a grip!

For some reason, my local 7-Eleven puts the dates on its receipts as year, month, day, which always confuses the hell out of me.

Redwolf

[pixyy]

Next you'll be telling us it's "more sensible" to write the date with the month first, then the day of the month and then the year. Get a grip!

For some reason, my local 7-Eleven puts the dates on its receipts as year, month, day, which always confuses the hell out of me.

Redwolf

working at an international company, that's the format we're supposed to write dates in on controlled documents.
I guess it's because nobody writes year/day/month (yet) so there would be no misunderstanding about what date is implies...

[MTGuru]

For some reason, my local 7-Eleven puts the dates on its receipts as year, month, day, which always confuses the hell out of me.

This format is becoming more popular because of computer sorting. When you write dates as YYYYMMDD 8-digit numbers, it's very easy to computationally sort dates as ordinary integers reading left to right. Any other scheme involves the messiness of breaking out the parts into individual fields and rearranging them.

I use this format nowadays for most dating, computer related or not, and find it elegant and easy to get used to.

[The Sporting Pitchfork]

When I'm writing things for myself, I always date them day/month/year...After living in the UK for a bit, it just made a lot more sense to me. I still try to think in metric...Drilled it into my system while living in Japan. I still tend to think of temperatures in centigrade first before Fahrenheit (as in, "Gee, it feels like it's about 5 degrees outside," rather than 42 degrees).

My middle-aged relatives in England never got with the grand metric system program, apparently. Younger people use it mostly, but you'll still hear plenty of people talking about a mile from this and six inches of that. Same in Canada: metric is used for temperature and most distance measurements, but it seems that a lot of people still tend to think of their height in feet and inches. When Canadian friends would tease me over Americans' ignorance of the metric system (not realizing that I had taken the time to learn it), I'd ask them to tell me how tall they were in centimeters--most of them were embarrassed to admit they had no clue.

For what it's worth, I'm 177 cm. tall...

[Lambchop]

Oh, that's easy! I'm 168 cm. Or 84, depending.

[chas]

Who was the first president of America?

http://www.marshallhall.org/hanson.html

Ah heavens damergatroyed,I was just trying to catch someone out,but the guru is just to clever.

Then there's "Benjamin Franklin, the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States." (Firesign Theater, Everything You Know is Wrong)

[I.D.10-t]

Who was the first president of America?

http://www.marshallhall.org/hanson.html

Ah heavens damergatroyed,I was just trying to catch someone out,but the guru is just to clever.

RORY

And all this time I thought it was Samuel Huntington.

[larrym.]

Did Roy Rogers really have Trigger stuffed?


Larry

[Denny]

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/trigger.html

[Flogging Jason]

A question I often get from the other cook at my work(who is 19 and always interrupts me during my shift beer) is: Are we out of ____? or: Do we have anymore____? Did you make any____? My natural response(which I contain for the sake of professionalism) is: Did you find any ___? Why don't you look for yourself! I always answer with a semi-courteous "no" instead.

I won't even get into the other stupid questions I've heard in my 12 years in the food industry!

Back to being off topic....I've always found it perplexing that an automobile often has some parts(bolts and such) that are metric and some that are standard. I also discovered that Napa Auto Parts only carries bolts that are Standard! (a friend of mine had a car issue today)
I suppose though that this is the result of different parts being manufactured overseas(let's save that topic for the PROCTology forum!)

[rorybbellows]

When a train travelling at 100 miles per hour hits a fly coming in the opposite direction,does the train really momenterally stop ?

RORY

[Lambchop]

Is it actually going to hit the fly? Or will the fly slide harmlessly off in the air current that curves around the front of the train?

You'd think that if flies often hit trains, the problem of removing the former flies would be a larger industry than it is. But you never hear about this.

Makes one wonder, doesn't it?