The Stupidest Question You've Ever Been Asked
 

Here or elsewhere. Preferably here.

"Can we go to see the leprechauns while I'm here?" Serious question from an Intel executive. I leave you to guess what nationality he was.

Irish, from County Cork. Am I write or am I right???

"How do you know you don't like women if you've never been with one?"

- my middle sister.

"Well you're not helping."

Upon being told that I sold audio equipment for a living "how many watts you got?"

"How do I import mangoes from Malaysia into Ireland?"
"You can't. They're banned by law."
"Do I need some sort of licence?"
"No, there is no licence. You simply can't bring them in."
"How do I get a licence?"
"There is no licence for you to get. You can't get a licence to do something illegal."
"But I need to import these mangoes!"
"You can't."
"Maybe some other agent can help me."
"No they can't. We're all bound by Irish law."
"How soon can I get a licence?"
"You can't."
and so on.
Took a half hour and a call from Customs and Excise to convince him that he had wasted his money; instead of checking first if there were any barriers to importing those ****ing mangoes, he bought them and then (unsurprisingly) the shipper wouldn't refund him.

I know where I would have liked to have stuck his ****ing mangoes.
I reckon they rotted, somewhat like his brain.

Why can't you import mangoes into Ireland?

Yeah, what do the Irish have against the world's greatest fruit??

And what kind of loser orders mangoes from Malaysia when Africa is right there?

"What language is spoken in Croatia?"

Me: "Croatian".

"Oh really? Is that like Italian?"

Me:"..............no."

How the **** would I know? Probably fatal to leprechauns: we all know they run the Department of Agriculture...
A loser who is badly out of pocket

Is it a mango thing or a Malaysian thing? Why does Ireland hate Malaysians?

In short he wanted "to boldly go where no mangoes gone before."

Where does Ireland import Dates, figs, pineapples, avocados, guavas, mangoes and mangosteens, fresh or dried. from?

Top trading partners (import of "Dates, figs, pineapples, avocados, guavas, mangoes and mangosteens, fresh or dried.") of Ireland in 2020:

Germany with a share of 21% (8.29 million US$)
Costa Rica with a share of 15.3% (5.97 million US$)
Netherlands with a share of 14.4% (5.63 million US$)
Chile with a share of 3.41% (1.33 million US$)
France with a share of 1.98% (773 thousand US$)
Italy with a share of 1.92% (748 thousand US$)
Mexico - 255 thousand US$
Algeria - 169 thousand US$
Ghana - 163 thousand US$
Colombia - 103 thousand US$

#justice4mangoes!!

Mangos? I just want my local grocers to import durians.

Oh I fully support a durian ban, that's just nasty.

I had durian in Thailand and it was quite nice, despite the ripe diaper smell. It didn't sit quite well, possibly due to the sulfur content, so I imagine one should perhaps not eat too much. Apparently it shouldn't be mixed with alcohol as the double whammy to the kidney might be a little much.

They sell it in asian stores here and then it's usually frozen so it doesn't smell much.

As for dumb questions, I've been asked a couple of times, once by a colleague, if insects are animals. I answer politely, but in my head I'm like what else would they be? Plants? Fungi?

Jesus. I could tell you that as an eight-year-old without a college degree.

'What are you studying? String theory? Omg is that about musical instruments, that's so cool!'
Tbh that was too sweet and endearing to be annoying

I'm pretty sure that, if you check my History of Ireland journal, when Henry the Optical Illusion, King of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, Wales, Scotland, The Isle of Man, One Little Island Just North of the Hebrides, The Rock of Gibraltar, Most of Africa Except for Ninety-Eight Percent of It And Anywhere He Damn Well Pleases (normally known as Henry the III) invaded England, his soldiers were armed with mangoes which they viciously attacked the Irish with. We had only Potatoes to fight back with and you know what they say - Mangoes where the gang goes, Spud are for duds.

To demonstrate his complete contempt of the Irish, in 1132 Henry actually appointed a large Mango as Governor General of Ireland. Its policies were something of a disaster, and its parliament was completely rotten.

We Irish do not forget.

#DownWithMangoes
Brilliant! :clap: :laughing:
#DownWithMangoes
Yeah well as they're part of the animal kingdom... not sure they're much fun though.

Wouldn't "To boldly go where no mangoes before" be a better pun?

#MangoMicks

At least they didn't think it was thong theory :)

By the way, cool to have a physicist on board! I occasionally pretend like I know anything about physics. This is gonna sound stupid, but you'd be surprised at how often creationists bring up that evolution and the various molecules and so on that are shaped by that are a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy).. and so while trying to refute those kinds of arguments, I kinda wish I'd taken a course or three. Biology had maths and chemistry, but not much physics.

lmao that's a new one to me. If you come across any nice specimens of discussions on the topic do share them; I'd actually be interested in seeing what kind of misguided thought acrobatics they use to come up with their arguments

Edit: this got me thinking and I suppose they base their argument on the fact that they've heard that entropy will eventually cause the universe to be an atom soup that is the same everywhere? Which makes them think new DNA combinations violate entropy? In that case what they don't understand is that entropy tends towards randomness, but that's not necessarily sameness. To use an example that I've been working on, if you align molecules they're all pointing in the same direction, but the randomness is reduced, so it comes at an entropy cost. The analogy with our genes is shaky at best anyway, but even if we viewed all the world's genes as a communal DNA soup, enforcing that everyone has the same DNA is actually less random and goes against the entropy principle

Like any good biologist should, I've tried to fight Darwin's good fight, battling ignorance and teaching people about evolutionary theory online. I've done it in various places. The last place I did it regularly was quora. The place is ripe with religious nuts. Someone can ask an innocent question about some aspect about evolution and you can be sure to find religious idiots invading comments. They really hound any discussion on the subject.

A few classics that I see again and again:

• Conceding that sure, evolution happens on the MICRO-level, but not on the macro-level (micro/macro-evolution isn't really a thing)
• Evolution is just a theory
• Evolution would break the second law of thermodynamics
• There's no fossil evidence. Where is it?!
• There's no evidence of a species turning into a different species
• That something as complex as the eye could not have evolved due to irreducible complexity (thoroughly refuted many times and long ago)

I got a little burnt out, so I haven't been doing it as much lately (came here instead). However, next time I find one of these idiots, I'll give you a nudge :)

Why seek out people who have mental disabilities in order to have arguments with them?
(yeah, I know: irony!)

Sadly, even if you don't want to, you'll probably find yourself having arguments just because loud idiots show up any time something relating to evolution is discussed.

Empirically based knowledge seems to be on a downwards trend in general. I saw the Q-anon documentary on HBO. It's scary how lies, myth and conspiracy theory just seem to spread like a wildfire, especially in the US. So many people don't know what's real anymore.

Yeah I've had several COVID hoax conversations with people at work and I'm almost waiting for COVID to kick that store in the balls just so I get to be right.

... and what if they worked in the dollar store? Is it really that impossible to memorize everything in that store cost only $1?

well they expect you to look it up as a faithful employee

Though my understanding of entropy is somewhat limited, I think I can recreate our general understanding of it along with their argument like this:

Let's say the universe is only my kitchen and I want to make a cup of coffee with the important property of coffee being that it is warmer than its surroundings. To heat water, I have a stove. If I have a hot cup of coffee, its heat will evaporate into the room, heating the room ever so slightly while cooling the cup and the difference in temperature outside and inside my coffee cup will decrease. This represents an increase in entropy. That energy is still in my kitchen, but it won't help me make more coffee. To do that, I need things I can burn in my stove. So over time, as I make more coffee, more of the energy in my kitchen that is tied up in matter instead gets converted into radiation, energy which is not useful to me in terms of coffee production. Eventually, there's no more matter, only evenly distributed raditation.

Their argument then I guess would generally be that something like a plant works to decrease entropy because it takes energy carrier by photons and orders that into building carbohydrates.

So to my dumb kitchen analogy, they argue that while I make cups of coffee, I could also grow plants. The light from the stove will provide them with energy to do photosynthesis. As the plants develop into wood, I get more wood for my stove. This DECREASES entropy in my kitchen. Perhaps I could keep it running indefinitely.

HOWEVER, without going into too much detail, even if the plant can do this and even if I can keep planting them, the best plants can hope to do is slow down entropy in my kitchen ever so slightly. Entropy is still increasing and moving my kitchen towards heat death.

So I'm not sure how good this is.. sorry if I made everyone reading this a little dumber :D

This is certainly true, the rest of your reasoning holds too. I don't really see the link with evolution though :laughing: Or are they just trying to argue that photosynthesis contradicts thermodynamics?

Haha, I edited that part out again and it was the best one :D

They'd say evolution orders energy, not just from photosynthesis/photons, but from inorganic chemicals, into molecules like proteins and DNA, hence reduces entropy in the universe.

Yeah that's just silly. They also should keep in mind that entropy decrease is not 'forbidden' by physics: it just comes at an energy cost, which means that it does actually happen if it is compensated by a higher energy reduction as a consequence

Right? That's what I always say :D

Thanks for your input, Marie :)

Sophomore year of high school I was asked by a classmate why we couldn't dig to the moon.

Man.. goes to show what sniffing glue does to people.

It was a real wind up too. Three of us are sitting there writing god-knows-what and this woman Emily goes:

"So, guys, you know how we can fly to the moon?"

And the three of us turned around like "where the **** is this going?"

But we were not prepared. I still remember the three of us looking at each other like, "did I hear this wrong?"

"The saw movies are about actual saws, right?"