Things I’ve just learnt

[hopeful777]

I just found out you can’t put a chopping board in the dishwasher unless you want it to break 😕

as my family are now laughing at me, it made me wonder what other things have people learnt in adulthood that maybe others assume should be intrinsically known?

@BiscuitLover3678

Google

They're both little pickled gross things you put on food that lots of people have never tried or seen. That's why they get mixed up

@TatianaBis

I mean I can understand people getting capers and gerkins confused, particularly cornichons, but what kind of small fish is round and lives in a jar?

Caviar - comes in various colours.

Cockles, winkles, periwinkles, obviously they are not actually a live in the jar.

And my point still stands: just because something is commonly served with fish really really doesn't make it sensible to conclude that the thing itself is a kind of fish.

Prawns and seafood are often served with fish too and often they are not mentioned on a menu

Prawns have no business being in a fish pie but they are frequently there.

On a slightly different topic you would not believe the number of teenagers who think blood is blue until you cut yourself and then the air turns it red.

Greenmandm
Pineapple, kiwi and papaya all have enzymes that "digest" the protein in jellies. When jellies set normally the protein strands shorten and hold the liquid you have added in a firm matrix. When the enzymes are incorporated in the jelly the protein strands lengthen and eventually break down, preventing the matrix of strands from forming

Ooh the blood is blue thing.....actually it has a foundation in truth. The expression blue blooded was because high born ladies were supposed to stay pale to denote that they didn't have to go outside to work. Therefore their skin was very pale, so the blood deoxygenated blood back to the heart appeared blue. If they somehow managed to cut themselves the blood on exposure to air gained back some oxygen and appeared redder

• blood vessels carrying

I learn alot from QI

@tkwal

Ooh the blood is blue thing.....actually it has a foundation in truth. The expression blue blooded was because high born ladies were supposed to stay pale to denote that they didn't have to go outside to work. Therefore their skin was very pale, so the blood deoxygenated blood back to the heart appeared blue. If they somehow managed to cut themselves the blood on exposure to air gained back some oxygen and appeared redder

I'm so pale I'm practically translucent, and you can definitely see my 'blue' blood through my skin. (Definitely not posh though).

I used to think that Majorca and Mallorca were two neighbouring islands

Capers aren't fish??

@tkwal

Ooh the blood is blue thing.....actually it has a foundation in truth. The expression blue blooded was because high born ladies were supposed to stay pale to denote that they didn't have to go outside to work. Therefore their skin was very pale, so the blood deoxygenated blood back to the heart appeared blue. If they somehow managed to cut themselves the blood on exposure to air gained back some oxygen and appeared redder

Blood (human blood) is always red, it does vary in colour depending on oxygen content but is always red.

The blue colour is because the veins are under flesh and that makes it look blue.

Exposure to air does not change the colour at all.

@BarbaraofSeville omg I saw that thread start but didn't know the outcome I thought she really had a very inefficient freezer!

@Magik01 now that's a handy hint (olive oil? All I need now is a tool to open such bottles! At the moment I use a fork

@Timeturnerplease intelligence and sense of direction are 2 different things! I'm intelligent my sense of direction is shit!

and we told him Numpties and Smarties.

@CaveMum I've relatives in North America they have a pic from a holiday in Montana with a moose next to the RV - fuck me! It's like a flipping dinosaur!!!

@Mumdiva99 I'm impressed! I can barely stand upright these days!

@BoredZelda squinty bridge's location came up on a mastermind question "where in the uk" I think the English contestant answered like Swansea or something! But then I wouldn't know every landmark in England/wales/Northern Ireland

I learned recently that the really hardworking woman in my office is actually twins.



@godmum56 I think there's 3 tunnels? I for each direction for passengers and a maintenance one?

@BorisKilledMyHusband yea I thought it was 3 thanks for that

On the island thing. I was watching the episode of friends where joey asks why Staten Island was called an island etc with a well travelled relative who laughed - but thinking it was Ross who was in the wrong - cue pulling up maps of New York islands to show them - still not sure they believed me/Ross/friends!

@Alyssasbackrolls ffs really?! I've only just got my bloody head around the standing charge and KWH crap! Why do they have to make it so Fucking complicated?!

Also, can the naysayers and 'How thick are some people on here' posters bore off? No-one needs your shitty negativity.

Agreed

NOBODY knows everything!

Everyone has knowledge gaps somewhere

@MissConductUS back when I last had a car poor dd really struggled to get her head around why cold water melted the frozen windscreen (I can't be arsed scraping shit!) So I would just run half a jug of water across the top of the screen then switch the wipers on and empty the rest over, by the time I came back from putting said jug back in kitchen car was good to go! dd was all "but it's COLD water" it took her way too long to fully "get" that cold water while cold, is still warmer than ice!

Re 2 finger scrolling what pissed me off when I bought the 1st laptop I've used in nearly a decade is how RIDICULOUSLY hard it was to locate the correct instructions not only for use of the mousepad but also for turning on the very much advertised light up keyboard!

But then that's true of a lot of tech!

If anyone ever invests the time and money in creating a database of idiot guides for most commonly used machinery they'll make a fortune - actual (c) that - that's MY idea!

@WomanStanleyWoman I think from your username you may be old enough to remember a certain ad about the water in Majorca? I'm still meeting people our (I think) age who think. Majorca and Mallorca are 2 different places

@zingally - they used aerosolised solvents dispersed in a machine not that dissimilar to a huge tumble dryer which also uses heat. They tumble the clothes in there and the solvent molecules lift the stains. More environmentally friendly aerosols are often used now but unfortunately they don't do as good a job on the cleaning side

Dry cleaning is also pretty crap for removing germs (especially bacteria) so eventually clothes that are dry clean only get quite smelly despite being "cleaned" because although the stains are gone most of the germs remain

I have ocd I know way too much about cleaning methods!

I won't buy dry clean only for precisely this reason

they assumed that mincemeat was a type of meat (rather than meat having its archaic sense of "food")

I think you've misunderstood slightly here mince pies literally originally contained spiced sweetened mince, I believe mostly lamb was used as it was cheaper than beef

I’d always thought the Berlin Wall divided East and West Berlin, but no - turns out it was a wall that encircled West Berlin.

I thought the same until a similar thread last year I'm 50 this year!

Then I made matters worse by telling my mum - she laughed so much she almost fell off her chair 

Thanks mum

Do all those teenage girls who love Harry Styles know?

Yes

I had a fun/interesting conversation when dd got all pearl clutchy (she's 21 but she is a 90 yr old in a 21 year olds body in many ways!) because her friends baby sister (14) DID know the meaning!



@katepilar the whole of the rest of my family - both sides - are very practical people, me? I can't hang a picture straight! They've all tried to teach/train me at various points to no avail the one that most perplexed my extremely practical mother was when I somehow managed to hang a door upside down! No I don't know how I managed it either and I didn't even realise until said mistake trapped me in my bedroom in my flat where I live alone and my cousin had to break in and rescue me and even she looked at said door

And said "but how did it stay in place?!"

She then helped me hang it right!

@LimaCharlieHotelPapa there's a stand up comedian I think Michael McIntyre I could be wrong who briefly in one of their shows says something like "half the audience wipe standing up the other half think they're wrong/weird but the half that wipe standing up think the ones that wipe sitting down are the weirdos"

IIRC camera then pans to the audience and you can see couples/relatives/friends suddenly discussing this with "ew" faces cos they all think the opposite way to them is weird

Me? I'm still trying to stand up from the loo while everyone else is arguing!

But, um, don't your cheeks kind of fill the gap you're trying to reach?...

And off we go politics/religion pah! The real controversial topic is how you wipe your arse!

That reminds me of something I read years ago, here probably, about people being advised that their nearest bank branch was about to close but there was another one a few miles away they could use. The customers had to point out to the bank that it might be a few miles as the crow flies but this was in a mountainous region (Welsh valleys, I think) and by road it was much further, and not possibly on a direct bus/train route.

Same problem where I live, if you google "nearest diy store" or whatever it goes by as the crow flies and gives you one's that are yes, a couple of miles away - across a river! And there's no longer a ferry! I also have fun and games with deliveries as the first part of my postcode is the same as some of the local island addresses. Companies that don't deliver to Scottish Highlands and Islands therefore won't deliver even though I'm on the mainland and yes I've phoned and explained they don't listen!

@joesev

My newest and best is that you can flip percentages. ie 20% of 50 is equal to 50% of 20. Its been revelatory when trying to do quick calculations of , for example 17% of something. I was always wary of Maths at school so actually finding something useful and interesting in the subject brings wonder.

Did anyone teach you about square numbers?

If you put crosses on squared paper, or use counters or coins, if you can make it into a square it is a square number

OO
OO

or

OOO
OOO
OOO

Once you have a square you can see that one side is the square root, so with the terrible pictures made up of 'O's 4 has the square root 2 and 9 has the square root 3.

So if you want to find the square root of 7, you cannot make a square

OOO
OOO
O

but you can see the number of 'O's is between 4 and 9, that means the square root will be between 2 and 3.

So if you want to find the square root of 7 without a calculator you can start with 2.5

Multiply 2.5 with 2.5 (otherwise known as squaring) and you get 6.25, which is less than 7 so you make the number bigger, say 2.6.

2.6 squared = 6.76

There is a formula where you calculate the next value based on the previous value called Newton Raphson that makes each successive 'guess' more accurate.

This is how your calculator works out the square root of something.

@sashh - I’m sorry, i am sure you thought that the fish/capers thing was over but… caviar isn’t a fish?!

It’s eggs.

Unless you just meant “stuff related to fish”?

Anyway, the numbers stuff is very cool! That I like.

@TheLoverOfTea

Capers aren't fish??

Why would you think this?!

@Violinist64

I am another who thought that a caper was a small fish until I read this thread.

Why?! There's nothing remotely "fishy" about a caper. I'm so amused & confused. 🤯

@meow1989

I learnt in recent weeks that if you put a mug with a metallic handle in the microwave to reheat your coffee, then pick it up by said handle, you will burn through several layers of skin on your fingers in places you will recurrently catch/rub on things whilst undertaking every day tasks. I swear I heard a sizzle when I did it

Me too

[quote lborgia]@sashh - I’m sorry, i am sure you thought that the fish/capers thing was over but… caviar isn’t a fish?!

It’s eggs.

Unless you just meant “stuff related to fish”?

Anyway, the numbers stuff is very cool! That I like.[/quote]
I know and the other stuff I mentioned is shell fish not fish fish.

And I doubt you can make an omelet with caviar.

I'm glad you like the maths, I'm a maths nerd.

Oh back to fish, in British Sign Language there are two signs for fish, one is for when it is fish swimming, the other is for fish that is bein eaten.

@sashh - do you know for a fact that calculators use iterative methods such as Newton-Raphson for square roots? I would have assumed they would just use the binomial expansion as that also works for other roots.

So square root of 7 is:

square root of 4 * (1 + 3/4) which is

2 * (1 + 3/4) ^ 0.5

= 2 (1 + [0.5 3/4] + [0.5 -0.5 / 2 (3/4) 2] + [0.5 -0.5 -1.5 / (2 3) (3/4) 3] + ... )

(I'm sure I read that this is also a technique used by Newton; it also has the advantage that each term can be quickly calculated from the previous one and convergence easily predicted in advance).

@sashh I love stuff like that!

I taught my DD the trick my maths teacher taught me for learning my 9 times table where you take away 1 from the number you are multiplying by to get the first digit of the answer and that the answer always adds up to 9:

So to work out 4 x 9 you take 1 from 4 which is 3 and to get from 3 to 9 you have to add 6 so that answer is 36!

7 x 9
7 - 1 = 6
6 + 3 = 9
So 7 x 9 = 63

Obviously that method only really works for learning your basic times table, but the rule that the answer to anything times 9 applies right through, so the answer to 1,642 x 9 is 14,778.

1 + 4 + 7 + 7 + 8 = 27
2 + 7 = 9

@Deathraystare

That wearing split peas is not a great look

Can't pull it off eh?

Sadly not, doesnt go with my colouring 😀

@DadDadDad no I don't know for sure. I know I spent a lot of time working with Newton Raphson in A level Computer Science but that was a long time ago.

NR is fairly simple to program, but I'm in my 50s now so things may well have moved on. Memory was a huge consideration in the 1980s.

That could also be an issue with binomial expansion uses fraction and decimals would take up less memory.

It might be like a bubble sort, no one actually uses it in real life but it is great introduction to sorting algorithms.

@CaveMum

I didn't know that one, I do know the finger bending one though.

Here's another one for nerds and for if they bring back 'the price is right'.

OK in the price is right they would ask you to guess the price of something.

Now should not start with what you think is a price, you start with a round nmber that is more than you think.

Assuming the presenter then says 'lower' you split that number in half

Subsequent guesses are half of the last number if the host says lower, or 75 if it is higher.

So you are guessing product X you think it might be £80 (it is really £86)

So you start with £100

If the host says lower (which in this example they do) you answer £50
If the host says lower you go for £25, if the host says higher then you go for £75.

Now in this example the host says 'higher' so you have to go half way between £75 and £100 ie £87

At this point you know the price is between £75 and £87, the host says lower so you are now at £81 and in real life you would be saying "81, 82, 83, 84..."

You will definitely guess the cost in the 2 mins or whatever.

@sashh @CaveMum* There's my problem, I appreciate that these 'tricks' work but my brain just doesn't listen and assume it's too complicated. Immediately translates to blah blah blah. Thx for trying though. Xx

I’m confused about Norwich and Amsterdam! Someone said they could be home an hour after touchdown (or close) but when I looked it up on Google maps it has a journey time of over 7 hours. How are you getting home so fast?

Another PP mentioned about her bladder not ever emptying fully... this is not right. If you have enough urine in your bladder to wet yourself straight after going to the loo, you are not voiding properly. This can cause recurrent UTIs and I would suggest needs investigation- you might have a narrowing which means you are not able to empty properly.
I did not know about Moose and Orcas. Mind blown.

[quote joesev]@sashh* @CaveMum There's my problem, I appreciate that these 'tricks' work but my brain just doesn't listen and assume it's too complicated. Immediately translates to blah blah blah. Thx for trying though. Xx[/quote]
Me, too. At my 2nd grammar school I was told that I hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of passing my maths GCE ( I did at the 2nd attempt) and numbers terrify me. Everything in my brain screams I don't understand it and can't do it.

@Snippysocks oddly I DID get O level at a B grade. I just have a predisposition to assume I can't do maths. I fear it is a common female trait.

@Sparklynewname they mean that if they fly to New York from Norwich Airport via Amsterdam, they arrive back at Norwich Airport so can get home from there within an hour. Despite having to go via Amsterdam, it works out quicker than flying direct to New York from Heathrow as it would take them 4.5 hours to get from where they live to/from Heathrow.