Things you are too embarrassed to admit you don't understand

[ClassicStripe]

I don't think I really understand what a fascist is.

I'm not an expert on cricket, so anyone who is feel free to correct me, but I've picked up a bit from being in a family of cricket fans.

Two teams, 11 players, one team batting and the other fielding/bowling. There are two batsmen in at a time, who each stand at one end of the pitch (the rectangle in the middle of the larger cricket field). They are each defending a wicket (three upright wooden sticks - the stumps, and horizontal wooden cross pieces - the bails) at either end of the pitch and need to be behind a line slightly in front of their wicket - the crease - when not actually running. On the bowling/fielding side, the bowler runs from behind one wicket (wicket A) and when they reach that wicket, bowl the ball down the pitch towards the other wicket (wicket B), which the batsman is defending with a bat. The batsman tries to hit the ball, if they do they run towards the wicket A, while the batsman from wicket A runs to wicket B. If they both do that, the team score 1 run. They can keep swapping places and scoring more runs until the ball is back with the bowler. The cricket field is marked with a rope boundary. If the ball bounces within the boundary and then goes over it, the batsman scores 4. If the ball goes over the boundary without bouncing, the batsman scores 6.

The bowling/fielding team are trying to get 10 wickets (get 10 batsmen out). There's one person bowling, a wicket keeper behind the wicket and 9 other fielders at various positions around the cricket field (these positions have names like silly mid off and I get confused which position is where). There are lots of ways batsmen can technically be out, but three main ones are if the bowler manages to knock the bails off when bowling the ball, if the batsman hits the ball and a fielder catches it, and if the batsmen are in the middle of running and a fielder knocks off the bails before the batsmen can get to the crease. Once one batsman is out, another member of the batting team comes out and joins the remaining batsman.

If you look at a cricket score, the first number is the number of runs and the second number is the number of wickets (e.g. 100-4 is a batting team having scored 100 runs but lost four wickets). Once 10 wickets have been taken, that's the end of the innings and the teams swap, so the bowling/fielding team start to bat. Both teams get 2 innings and the team with the highest number of total runs wins. The match has to be completed within 5 days (with a certain amount of breaks for lunch/tea), so too much rain means there won't be enough time for all 4 innings so a draw is declared.

Why people insist on saying "daylight savingS".

I am never embarrassed about not knowing something.

But I am an information vulture, I love learning, and if some subject crops up that I don't know about I will usually love to jump down the worm hole to investigate.

I don't understand space. Where does it end? So there are planets and smaller planets i.e. stars out there but what's beyond that? Any scientists that can explain infinity or however you would describe it? I'm generally pretty intelligent but can't get my head round this at all. How can space not have and end? Aaargh!!

Curtain sizes. Been explained to me several times but it doesn't stick. I'm late 40's 😁

this is exactly how my brain works...'just, stop-it?!' 🤷🏻‍♀️

I find it frustrating that humans have set up overly complicated systems which benefit few, none of it makes sense to me.

I also don't understand humans need for power - if i was Rishi Sunak id be sunning meself in the Maldives, would i fuck want to be PM if i had millions/billions in the bank!

Radio and x rays

This doesn't happen in my car at all 🤔

When a satnav vocal direction pops up, my caller will usually remark on where I am heading.

I have it set fairly loud though.

A MNer described grief as being like a rock you have been given to carry.

You can't put the rock down, give it to someone else or carry anyone else's rock.

Over time, and through carrying, bits of rock get knocked off. It gets a bit smoother, you get used to carrying it. Sometimes the rock is a comfort. Sometimes the rock gets knocked even many years down the line and you get sharp bits exposed.

I like the analogy of the rock.

The engines move the car or aeroplane through the air.

Someone I know remembers this by thinking of all the deductions (tax, NI etc) falling through holes in a net, so there's less money left in net pay.

That might help if you're a visual thinker.

I'm a verbal thinker, so I just think that gross = big, and gross pay is a bigger number.

So many things:

Tennis, I don’t know what 40 love or whatever means, or how they know who has won. In fact most sports, except football. Cricket - what’s that all about?

Wi fi, data roaming, Bluetooth. I sort of know what it is but I have no idea what a “good” amount of data is, does Wi-Fi sort of just hang in the air and you drift in and out of it?

Satellites - again, are they just things that hang in the air and let us watch Sky tv or something?

Anything to do with figures - interest rates, inflation, I just glaze over.

Cars, especially engine size - don’t know what this means or what my car has. No idea what a carburettor is.

I’m not stupid, I just feel there’s a lot of commonly known stuff that I’ve missed out on understanding.

They are upside down as compared to you, but because the earth is round they still have their feet on the ground and their head towards the sky and don’t feel upside down. when you go to the southern hemisphere the night sky looks the opposite way round compared to the northern hemisphere. The constellation of Orion is very obviously upside down for instance.

It's to get water uphill. If there weren't locks, boats would all be stuck in low lying places.

Not so much of a problem now that we have lorries and motorways, but it would have taken much longer to get lots of cargo from place to place in the days when a load was restricted to how much a horse could pull a wagon without needing a rest.

Ships don't sink because density is equal to an object's mass divided by its volume eg how many kilograms it is per cubic metre.

A ship has lots of air contained within its volume so its overall density is less than water.

Anything less dense than water will float on it

It's to get barges up hill and back down safely.

Water can't flow up hill (unless pumped)

I don't understand electricity. I've had it explained to me in a myriad of different ways, but I still don't understand it. I especially don't understand how it can give us light and heat, and make things move.

And why do things need to have an earth wire? A (very clever) friend tried to explain that it's for leftover electricity to go somewhere safe so we don't get electric shocks (at least, I think that was the gist of it, I could have got that completely wrong). When I said that we must be being charged for unused electricity that went back down the earth wire, and that it should show as a credit on our bills, he practically wept with despair.

Ditto trigonometry. What the actual fuck is it, and what is it for?

Me too! and always, always in the most gory detail. I am sorry you are unwell and have had to have x, y and z done to you, but please I do not need to know everything (especially to do with bowels and eyes)

Physics in general
loads of economic stuff

I heard an interesting theory about that. You know how people often moan about others (especially their own children) being fussy and unwilling to eat anything unfamiliar? Maybe those "fussy" people served as their tribe's control group!

So the tribe moves to a new area and encounters a new mushroom. An adventurous eater says, "Hey, that looks yummy and we're very hungry. Let's try it!" The fussy eaters reply, "No way! I am not touching that weird mushroom." Three days later, all the adventurous people have just about recovered (or not) after puking their guts up, while the fussy ones are scampering about unscathed. The penny drops: it wasn't the flu; it was the mushrooms. The whole tribe has benefited from its "fussy" members' refusal to taste the mushroom.

Stock markets.

I don’t understand how they work, how they go up and down all the time, like literally zero. I couldn’t say one work about them.

Phones-how on earth can you talk into a phone and be heard on the other side of the world?

@LakieLady trigonometry is used to calculate the lengths and angles of triangles. Engineers use it.

@beguilingeyes I haven't seen anyone respond to this so I will try to explain time signatures.

When music is written down it is divided into a number of shorter sections known as bars.

For the most simple time signatures the top number in the time signature refers to the number of beats that are in each bar. When you hear a piece of music you can often hear an obvious rhythm. For example, a march sounds like ONE two, ONE two, ONE two, ONE two. The top number in the time signature will be a 2. A waltz sounds like ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three. In that case the number at the top of the time signature will be a 3.

For the most simple time signatures, the bottom number refers to the type of beats in each bar. Basically the lower the number the longer the type of note that forms the beat. A bottom number of 2 means that the beats are minim beats. A bottom number of 4 means that the beats are crotchet beats. So you might write a quick march in 2/2 but a slower march in 2/2.

So far, so logical. You are probably more confused by the 6/8 or 9/8 type time signatures. These are known as "compound" time signatures, to differentiate them from the "simple" time signatures described above.

In compound time signatures, the bottom number still gives you a clue about the type of note that the bar is divided into. The most common is 8, which means that the bar is divided into quavers. And as before, the top number tells you how many there are of them in each bar. The important difference is that these notes do not form the beat.

As an example, in 6/8 there are six quavers in each bar. However, these are grouped together into two beats of three. The rhythm sounds like ONE two three FOUR five six, ONE two three FOUR five six. There are actually two beats in the bar but they are dotted crotchet beats (each dotted crotchet is worth three quavers).

For 9/8 there are 9 quavers in each bar, grouped together as 3 dotted crotchet beats. In 12/8 there are 12 quavers in each bar grouped together as 4 dotted crotchet beats. And in 3/8 there are 3 quavers grouped together into one beat.

Just to add to the confusion, you might sometimes see a time signature with a 4 at the bottom but where the number at the top is a 6, 9 or 12.

The top numbers are a clue that you are looking at a compound time signature. In 6/4 there will be 6 crotchets in a bar but they are grouped into 2 dotted minim beats. It will have the same rhythm as the 6/8 bar. In 9/4 there will be 9 crotchets grouped together in 3 dotted minim beats.

Hope that helps!

When reversing into a.tight spot and a man comes along, stands in front or behind the car and starts exhorting via hand movements that I should turn the steering wheel one way or the other. I can never interpret which way I should turn it. Indeed I would have no idea how to direct someone else and am never at all sure if I do what the person says will have the desired effect and whether I need to turn the other way due to a mirror image or if the person, always a man, is doing it right in the first place.

Why teaching maths puts so much emphasis on algebra, trigonometry, and calculating the length of a ladder using the angle of the sun, etc, rather than ensuring the majority of the population are able to operate as functional adults in relation to managing money and understanding numbers: ratios, percentages, risk, fractions, mls, weights, etc.