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

[ClassicStripe]

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

I don't understand how a crush I had on a celebrity 34 years ago (for about 4 years), suddenly resurrected itself when I saw them last year. Not complaining, I'm enjoying it. Presuming it's my hormones. Nobody else seems to fancy him :)

I mean this in a nice way, but I dont understand this answer. (Its a bit complex for my tiny brain, ha ha)

Bitcoin

Just what UseOfWeapons said...
Pensions. No matter how or whom they are explained, I can understand for a few minutes, then the fog descends once more.

Yes, yes, yes! I think I find it mind-numbingly boring tbh and this prevents me focusing/retaining the info, even though it is very important.

Jealousy is based an the idea that you've been deprived of something by the other person having it.

Envy is just wanting what someone else has.

I'm jealous that my friend won the raffle and I didn't. Why should she get all the luck?

I'm envious that my friend has beautiful skin and I have acne.

Practice and practise follow the same rules as advice and advise. But advice and advise are pronounced differently so we find it easier to know which one to use.

If you don't know whether to use practice or practise, say the sentence to yourself but substitute advice and advise in the place of practic(s)e. It won't make literal sense but one way will sound totally wrong.

"I must do my piano advise."
"I must do my piano advice."
The sentence with advise sounds completely wrong so you would know the sentence would be "I must do my piano practice."

OOOOOH Yes this is me too x

This answer makes much more sense, thanks LadyBird.

The difference between affect and effect...

I always remember it as 'the effect' vs 'it affects' thE Effect is how I say it in my mind.

Same with stationary vs stationery - stationAry is to stAnd and stationEry is papEr 😆

I was going to ask this but I was scared Id be accused of being ignorant. Some people aren't very nice on here. So why do gay men go camp (or so it seems)?

War crimes and national debt as concepts confuse me.

I don't understand the idea that only doing some extra bad war things is illegal, does this mean that starting a regular war and doing regular war things is legal? Can I start a war? Legal in whose country?

National debt. If all countries are in debt, who are they in debt to? Each other? Wouldn't it all just cancel out? Who bankrolls the whole thing? I also don't have a strong grasp on why the increasing interest rates is meant to fix inflation. I find radio 4 level economics often too hard and I'm embarrassed by this because I'm a scientist with strong maths skills.

Your gut is your large and small intestines, that go from the bottom of your stomach (the internal organ) to your anus. Basically a long wiggly tube that your partially digested food moves along whilst your body absorbs the nutrients within it.

The gut contains bacteria that help the digestion process, but sometimes unhelpful bacteria can grow there too. Or your useful bacteria can be killed off.

My son is colourblind, here are different types, most people are red/green (so these blend to look more brown) but my son has 3 diff types of colourblind-ness. The result is my son can see shades of brown and blues only. He can differentiate shades of brown as being certain colours sometimes, if they are bright versions, but if they are subtle shades, they are very hard to separate. Some blend entirely and look the same to him.

Yesterday he was doing some lettering for a website. One word blended from bright purple to lime green - think hulk colours. The other word was a bright blue to orange. He could see the transitions from one colour to the other one both words, but he thought both were identical Blue - Green, when they were very very different and neither word was the colours he wanted them to be.

I find his vision so fascinating. We have done various "experiments" to find his full range of colour, and brown and blues are all he see. Where as i see a large spectrum of colours (those games where you pick out one very slightly different shade im very good at). Id love nothing more than to get him the glasses, but as he has various types of colourblind-ness, they wouldn't work for him. I cant imagine what its like to see the world without colour. Colour makes me happy, and i feel so sad for him he will never truly experience it.

National debt. If all countries are in debt, who are they in debt to? Each other?

@Mourningmorningsleep - national debt is government borrowing but it doesn't generally involve borrowing from other countries. UK government needs to raise some cash to meet its current spending, so it issues debt (called gilts or government bonds), and mostly these are bought by investors, usually institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies.

So notionally, the UK Treasury gives the investor a piece of paper that says "I'll pay the owner of this piece of paper say £3 million pounds each year, for the next ten years and then pay you £100 million pounds at the end of the ten years". In return the investor will pay around £100 million up front to own that piece of paper. (The exact amount paid will be affected by the market's view of interest rates over the next 10 years).

So now the UK Treasury has around £100 million to use, and a commitment to repay interest (the £3million annual "coupons") and finally pay back £100 million at the end. Meanwhile the gilts (those pieces of paper) can be traded, so investors buy and sell, with the new owner being able to claim the remaining coupons and the final (maturity) payment. Because the market's view of interest rates changes all the time, the value of those pieces of paper fluctuates.

Companies can borrow in the same way by issuing corporate bonds. Their value fluctuates in the same way, but partly due to market's view of the credit-worthiness of the company (ie how likely they might default on repaying the debt).

Great explanation of debt!

I will add...the UK is in part in debt to many of us because pension funds like to hold government debt as it's very safe (the UK government has always paid back).

This definitely. I watch Stargazing Live when it's on and sit watching their explanations thinking "yep, totally got this, makes perfect sense."

Then the programme ends and I think about it again and think "nope... it's gone!"

So with the bio /non-bio washing powder /liquid thing where the enzymes in bio don't work so well at higher temperatures, does that mean that if you ar doing sheets or towels on a hotter wash, you should use non-bio?

And at what temperature do the enzymes stop being so effective? I imagine it's a sliding scale, but is it more pointless at 60 or 90?

I usually do everything on 40, but occasionally think I should probably give towels /sheets a 60 wash just for a treat. But always use bio powder.

How you can drive a tour bus down the road complete with a kitchen, master bedroom, other bedrooms for the team, a living space, TV area, etc...whilst fitting into the same lane as a car. What the hell. Same for buses with an aisle down the middle. Impossible.

The simplest way to think about pensions is that they are a (tax efficient) way of sending money forward to your future self, from the time when you have more money than you need to spend, to the time when you aren't earning and need money.

We drove a ridiculously big RV (camper van) round Canada for a couple of weeks once. Those babies do not fit into regular parking spaces!

Brexit (and why were allowed to vote in a referendum about something so complex)

Hahaha this!! My husband looks at me like I’m an idiot whenever I point it out.

But if I’m in traffic behind a bus, I’m quite close to the passenger next to me in my car, with a tiny gap for the gear stick between us.

The bus is clearly bigger, but it doesn’t seem that much bigger to compensate for 2 adult seats, an aisle, and then ANOTHER 2 seats.

Blood pressure numbers. Nope don't get it.

Yes kind of. The energy in our bodies is locked up in chemical bonds, e.g. the bond between two carbon atoms. If our molecules undergo chemical reactions, e.g. the two carbons break their bond, then bond to oxygens and become two carbon dioxide molecules, then the difference in the bond energy is released. If you are cremated, your big carbon-based molecules become CO2 in a reaction that releases heat, combustion. If you decay in the ground they also become CO2 and release heat but the reaction is slower and helped along by bacteria etc. Think of a compost heap, it gives off heat because of exothermic reactions in decaying organic matter.

Conversely, turning CO2 into large organic molecules,breaking the bonds to oxygen and making bonds to C, H etc. require additional energy. This energy comes from the sun during photosynthesis.

Physics also says that matter can convert to energy and vice-versa through E=MC2 but that is something very different. When we decay our atoms (the matter) still exist and they will exist for billions of years to come, just the bonds between them swap about, and different chemical bonds contain a different amount of energy.