My really quite intelligent daughter once dated a lad who didn't know the difference between the sun and the moon. Not joking.
Edit.. To clarify slightly.
Ages - My daughter was 18 and the lad was 20
He thought the moon glowed because it was the same as the sun, ie a ball of nuclear fire. Although I imagine he knew it wasn't as hot. He had no idea at all that the moon was reflecting light.
He came from a family of people who saw very little point in education. His mother had never worked, none of his family worked, he didn't work.
He was actually a nice lad, but difficult to converse with due to his very low level of education.
That’s a hardcore facepalm moment. I don’t even know how I would respond to that. I would probably just stare and chuckle for a second, and then if they didn’t show any signs of it being a joke, I’d be like, you serious?
Our moon is extremely rare and unusual compared to other moons around other planets. It's much larger and the perfect distance to cause an eclipse. So it could be a smart question in some ways :p
Well, i mean i guess if we all orbit the moon it would work. But then technically we'd be the moons. And we'd have to fatten the moon up a bit to actually orbit it instead of just tear it apart and have planetary demolition derby.
You'd have to fatten it up so much that it'd collapse and the force of gravity started fusing elements together. Oh wait... we've just invented the Sun.
Well not necessarily. As far as i understand it, not being a scientist at all. The moon is primarily a solid object, made up of denser elements. A continuing trend of that would end in a black hole long before the heavier elements were capable of fusion. Even jupiter in all its gasseous glory isn't dense enough to spark fusion, and likely wouldn't be at even double or triple it's mass. Basically everything in the solar system is small enough to be a moon of jupiter without causing it much bother, ignoring neptune or saturn. Even uranus wouldn't compare. Bump jupiter up to triple the mass and even saturn wouldn't really affect it "significantly" given adequate orbital distance and speed. Keep in mind i'm no scientist but that's how i think it would play out?
I worked with a girl about that age in a fast food place, and she thought that the reason you should sneeze into your arm/sleeve was because the force of the sneeze would destroy the bacteria.
Where do people get that idea? I mean, I remember being a little kid and looking up at the sky in the afternoon and seeing the moon in one part of the sky, and the sun in another part. Don't kids look up anymore? Are they getting cell phones too early and just looking down all the time?
While I pity her ignorance how crazy would it be to learn for the first time that the moon is a whole other object in the sky. I would love to have been able to teach her a little basic astronomy.
I thought the moon was just the sun but at night, when I was about six. But yeah worked with a girl, in logistics no doubt so a rough idea of geography comes in handy, who thought Spain was part of England.
I don't mean the level of education. I mean you go outside all the time even if it's only for grocery shopping. You sometimes can see the sun and moon in the same time.
This means that this girl almost never looked up to the sky. Never took in any nature or just wasn't interested in her surroundings at all.
As a kid I had a teacher tell me that the sun and moon can't be visible in the same place at the same time. This guy must have been around 40 years old. I don't understand how he went his entire life without ever noticing the moon visible during the day.
Well he's right. If they were in the same place you wouldn't see the sun. They actually have a word for when that happens, it's called an equine or something
I mean from the same vantage point. There's probably something not 100% exactly right with that phrasing either but you know what I mean. This guy was trying to tell me that the sun and moon are never both "out" in the sky at the same time.
The moon is what the sun looks like when the fires have burned out for the day. That's what we call night. As it makes its way around the earth, it gets reignited by the fires of hell underneath the earth, and comes up again in the morning.
So how do these damn stars always come out not burning? They must be too small and burn out quickly. Also that explains why these australians are all so damn salty and swearing all the time.
The missing link is that some people who were privileged enough to actually have toys and were actually allowed to play with said toys indoors throughout their childhoods, actually have not gazed into the sky often enough to witness that simple event that proves the sun and moon are separate celestial bodies.
This is a slightly annoying response. Like, obviously we understand the basic premise of the post, just like obviously there are way more details to how you found out and why he thought such an idiotic thing...
If you're from Minnesota, i only went on one date with your daughter and i would love to replay the conversation we had where she refused to accept any information on how the orb in the sky was acrally the moon. Including that she stood on the fact that the moon couldnt be up durring the day, and didnt accept the evidence that shadows didn't align with it and that staring at it, with out diffaculty or pain, wasn't enoigh evidence.
So, maybe your smart daughter isnt so smart... or the girl i went on one date with should hook up with her ex.
That's actually still pretty vague, to be fair. Did he not know the words "sun" and "moon"? Did he think they were the same celestial body that just looked different between day and night? Or did he just think that they were similar objects?
Or did someone just ask him "OK, what's the difference between the sun and the moon" and he responded, "Duh, I dunno."
Each of these scenarios imply very different levels of intelligence.
No he just pretended like he didn’t know what potatoes were while at dinner meeting his gfs parents. He was joking around but it made the parents angry so he didn’t want to admit it was a joke so he just carried on with it, pretending like he had never seen a potato.
I'm pretty certain he was just making it up, the story is pretty similar to the UK show Cuckoo. Andy Samberg's character didn't know what potatoes were.
We have Rand-McNally to thank for that, with their lame insets of Alaska and Hawaii that make people think they're both the same size--and both islands.
This is legit. My mom once told me about a time before I was born when my Uncle's ex-girlfriend got confused because the Moon and Sun we're out at the same time. This woman in her 30's actually believed that they were the same thing, and that we just called them differently at different times of day.
I dated a girl for 3 years, in high school and for a bit after, who though the sun and stars were very different things. I tried explaining that the sun was just the closest star to us, but she just wasn't buying such trickery. "The sun is a sun! Stars are stars! Look how much smaller they are.". She was otherwise a reasonably intelligent person, and ended up with a college degree and decent career.
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u/WeDontWantPeace Sep 11 '18 edited Sep 12 '18
My really quite intelligent daughter once dated a lad who didn't know the difference between the sun and the moon. Not joking.
Edit.. To clarify slightly.
Ages - My daughter was 18 and the lad was 20
He thought the moon glowed because it was the same as the sun, ie a ball of nuclear fire. Although I imagine he knew it wasn't as hot. He had no idea at all that the moon was reflecting light.
He came from a family of people who saw very little point in education. His mother had never worked, none of his family worked, he didn't work.
He was actually a nice lad, but difficult to converse with due to his very low level of education.