For real. Everytime I get in the shower I end up having to point the showerhead away and cower from the cold water and I could have just turned it on first?
I’m in awe of the guys who pull their trousers entirely down at urinals when they must have seen everyone around them not doing that.
I’m a first gen immigrant but despite having native American English, sometimes once in a blue moon I’ll encounter a semi-rare word I’ve yet to be exposed to.
So my closest analog is that I was confused for the longest time why people kept referring to statues of figures from shoulder level upwards as busts when they never had chests or breasts or boobs or blossoms or busts!
So for the longest time not only was I confused, I would be on the lookout for statuses that depicted from breast height upwards, but I never found one, lol.
I can’t think of an incident like this off-hamd for myself, but I once dated a woman who didn’t know that women have a urethra. She thought the urine just came out of her vagina. She was ~23.
“I’m working on my masters and I feel like such a dumbass…”
Never assume someone with an advanced degree knows anything outside of that degree because “they must be smart”.
Honestly, speaking as somebody with two different masters degrees, it’s a good idea to not assume they know anything WITHIN their degree field too, until they prove otherwise.
I worked with someone who was working on his second PhD in computer science and the guy did not know how to print.
Literally couldn’t figure out how to click the print button.
In computer science.
PhD.
Computers.
‘Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes’
- Dijkstra, 1970
I’ve worked in tech for almost 20 years. A big misconception is confusing Computer Science and IT. Computer Science is generally more about logic, data structures, and programming paradigms across languages. IT is generally more about the configuration, deployment and usage of technology and operating systems for end users.
There’s a ton of nuance in there, like Infrastructure or devops, where it’s about the deployment of technology software and hardware to power large technology services, which sits in the middle.
That being said, I’ve generally found that the more specialized someone is in computer science, the less they know about the operating system they use and how it works. Especially if they spent the time to go for a PhD or something.
The smartest programmer I’ve ever met is my boss, our CTO. PhD from an Ivy League school. Can write haskell on a napkin, even though our stack doesn’t touch haskell. Also doesn’t know shit about how MacOS works even though he uses a Mac, and consistently asks me relatively simple questions regarding unix/linux differences, filesystem stuff, package managers, etc. It’s very interesting to see the difference in knowledge.
Absolutely. I’m a tech, hubs is a dev. Brilliant dev, one of the foremost specialists in my country.
Can’t build a pc for shit, can’t fix a network issue, screams for wifey when the printer’s being a dick :D
Haha I’m unsure if “opposites attract” fits here, but perhaps “there’s no computer science without the computer”
nah, no opposites here, but it’s been funny watching over the years (we met outta uni) how extreme specialisation has pruned other branches. He isn’t fussed, I buy / setup/maintain all the equipment and like all BOFH I’m a raging control freak so I like he doesn’t try to play with the setup.
You can tell he is smart because he asks you about stuff outside of his domain.
Oh yeah he never has that Dunning Kruger setup I see from Junior people on the team. He knows (or finds out) who to ask and when, and always admits when he doesn’t know something. All super important qualities that some people learn earlier rather than later in probably every industry
Wouldn’t it make sense though for computer scientists to make some effort to actually learn how to do practical things on computers? This seem weird to me, like a car designer who never drives. Sure you could probably design a decent vehicle never having driven one, but you might make a fantastic vehicle if you have.
To be honest, printer technology is some arcane eldrich bullshit
There is a difference between “intelligent” and “smart” is the way I like to describe myself.
I’m college educated. But I’m also the guy that took twelve years to realize that his stove had a cook-timer on it…
Anti vax nurses are my favorite.
They aren’t mine because of the amount of damage they can do
I know mine has one, I just don’t know how to use it. Does that count?
I know I have one and know how to use it but I don’t know why I’d use it
Boiling eggs but your phone is charging
My microwave has at timer function, extremely useful.
Also theres a difference between being knowledgeable and smart or intelligent. I know a lot of facts because I’m curious about stuff. But I’m not particularly better at figuring things out than the average person.
Famous physicist and misogynist “Surely you’re Joking” Mr. Feynman comes to mind. Didn’t even know you can’t have both lemon and milk in you tea.
I’m not joking, and don’t call me Shirley.
Being “smart” and “thinking” are two very different things. You can be very smart but have no conscious thought. You can be a great thinker without ANY formal education or experience. (Calm down internet geniuses, you’re not that special.)
We might start figuring out how to get either one if we start understanding that there’s a difference.
Your brain doesn’t work the way you think it does. Your mind isn’t entirely your own. Your language influences your internal dialogue, and if you have no internal dialogue, you need to exercise that by reading a lot more and thinking about your thinking.
when I was little I would wait for the water to warm up, then pull the thing to turn on the shower head. But there’s like 2 seconds of freezing water in the tube to the shower head so I would have to really quickly pull it, run back to the edge of the shower, and block it with the shower curtain. It had a 50% chance of failure and I did it for years
I learnt that there’s a bit of cold water when switching to the shower head the hard way.
Pointed it at my wife and swapped it and she screamed. Whoops lol.
…and you survived. That’s amazing. :)
I remember this thread. One of the responses was from someone who thought that the beep his car made when locking the doors got quieter when activated from further away.
We had a guy at work a couple years ago, nice guy but not too bright. He’d fill his bottle from the water cooler, and always got surprised by how fast it filled up at the top. He thought the water cooler’s dispenser somehow got faster as the bottle filled up, not realizing that it’s because the top of the bottle is narrower than the bottom.
Well…by the power of the inverse square law, they kinda do, I guess.
Also probably by the power of Grayskull
Ow. My face.
If your dinner scrapings are too soupy or wet to go in the bin, you can tip the whole thing in the toilet so you don’t have to fanny about trying to sieve the noodles and vegetables while decanting it into the kitchen sink.
30 years old when I had dinner at a friend’s house and they did it casually like it was obvious.
You’re not supposed to just stand there and waste that warming-up water, you’re supposed to collect it in a watering can and put it on your plants! It’s got stuff from having sat in the water heater so it’s not the best for drinking but plants don’t mind.
This legitimately is something I’ve been looking for as I hate just running a gallon of water out for no reason.
Iirc if your water boiler supports it, you can have it circulate the hot water in the pipes to warm them up without wasting water
I don’t think that’s possible in my 1970s building. My water heater is in the kitchen and the tub/shower is way across the apartment so I get 2 gallons. I have a big balcony with lots of happy plants.
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Love that for once we’re mostly not mocking them and are actually sharing similar experiences, we’ve all had one of those moments.
I genuinely can’t tell you what my thing is. Other than that deep down, I know the feeling and know that I have one. This has happened to me before. I have felt this feeling. I just don’t remember what about. I’ll keep you guys posted if I remember.
I’m joining you on team traumatic memory repression.
For me it was about 5 years ago, I’m over 30, realizing that my parents and extended family lied to me about watermelon seeds growing in your stomach.
It was just so ingrained in me as a child that it took more than 20 years for me to question it.
Watermelon is so much easier to eat now.
I learned recently that your can cut the two vertices that form the base of triangle watermelon slices (so that the slice becomes a top-heavy pentagon) so that they don’t collide with people’s cheeks when they eat them. You can do it on quater-wedges before you make them into individual slices.
It’s seems so obvious but none of the adults around me did it growing up, lol.
Maaaaaaaan. Gonna have to try that lol.
Parenting. You think you’re doing great and you realise at times that some of the thing a you take for granted, you haven’t taught your kids.
Just because they’ve seen you do something a thousand times doesn’t mean they understand why
I remember a story of a child watching their mother cook a roast, and asked why she cut the ends off before putting it in the oven.
The mother learned it from her mother, so they both went and asked the grandmother.
Turned out the grandmother used to have a small oven and did that to make it fit.
There’s a weirder variant where they always cover meat with a draining rack while it’s marinating. After N years the grandparent visits for dinner and explains “yes but you see we had a cat…”
I immediately thought of the variant of this story I’ve heard when I read the post.
In the variant I heard: grandma never had bakeware that could fit the entire roast.
Same difference. I kinda like yours better.
As a parent, I was surprised at the amount of stuff kids need to be taught. Stuff that I assumed was obvious isn’t - it’s learned behaviour. And you don’t realize that it’s learned until you see your kid struggling with some trivial task.
The fun part is watching your kids figure out complex and nuanced things that you never even thought about, much less understood, while struggling with those trivial tasks.
OMG yes! One of my kids I have to micromanage to brush their teeth but is like Deanna Troi when it comes to their friends. (I’m more Data)
The fact that those are the comparisons you chose to use confirms you are, in fact, more like Data, hehe
As an ex kid, I only recently realised my parents taught me almost nothing. Even though I later learned a lot of very varied things, I could have started much better equipped for life. To people who chose to have kids, don’t be like my parents. It’s really crippling.
An interesting one that sums it all up - crawling babies aren’t instinctively scared of cliffs or drops, they have to learn not to crawl off an edge. Which isn’t all that surprising except for the fact that when they start walking, they don’t carry this lesson forward and will happily walk off an edge. They need to learn it again.
See also: why LLMs can seem clever and still be incredibly stupid
I just had to say “don’t put your chicken in your butt” to be met with “Why?”
It was the chicken that asked the why?
And of course, we have a relevant xkcd.
To be fair this is possibly the most relevant xkcd of all time
Yeah it’s probably the most linked xkcd with some margin, would be fun to see the traffic data to that page.
And once again, we learn that common sense is actually not that common.
I’m positive if we took a closer look at your life we’d find many such things. Nobody is perfect.
Yeah I thought nobody being perfect was common sense.
I only fail ironicly.*
I’m so thrown off by our current shower which legit heats up in 2 seconds. I was so used to waiting like a minute for it to warm up, I built my rituals around that. But this one… it’s just hot, like right away. Bizarre
In fancy installs, the hot water supply is a loop, not a tree, and a circulating pump keeps the entire run hot.
That sounds like a great way to waste energy.
Sorry, you’ve met wealthy people, right…?
It’s just dumb engineering to heat up a pipe the entire day for the 0.8% of the day you need it to be hot.
With enough insulation, anything can meet energy-efficiency standards. XD
Insulation + retaining heat means it isn’t nearly as energy inefficient as you think.
They keep the water tanks heated all day, and not heating the pipes means they have to do more work as they are drained of more water to fill the length of pipe to the shower which will then lose that heat over the course the day, only to need the water heater to heat it back up again.
Heat pumps generally use a lot less power. Don’t need to heat up much if it is already slightly hot.
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Have you read the previous comments? Because that’s exactly what’s implied.
It’s typically used for large complexes like campuses where the hot water is made en masse in one building and the loop goes around all the other buildings. Helps keep cost down (at construction) because you only need one giant water heater. Helps not have to wait 10 minutes to bring the hot water to your building. Energy still gets wasted but given the number of users, not that bad.
Someone else already pointed out that these are usually pretty well insulated systems that don’t radiate much energy, but also consider how many dozens of gallons of water aren’t being wasted by waiting for it to be warm.
Nearly all of these systems are put on timers. So they stop cycling while you’re at work or over night. They’ll often make it a part of the smart home ecosystem as well, so you can override from a smart home device or phone
If you have a hot water tank, that hot water is just sitting there getting cold just waiting to be heated up again. A circulating pump puts that hot water to use by circulating it through the pipes, which has a nice side effect in cold climates of preventing the pipes from freezing and bursting. I doubt it wastes much energy as you think.
Hot water tanks do not just “get cold”; they are fantastically well insulated. And a great way to lower peak energy usage by accumulating heating power, making it possible to use a heat pump to heat the water.
Hot water tanks are usually not that well insulated. If you want to save electricity an easy thing to wrap a good later insulation around it.
Rather than just dumping the cold water down the drain?
A huge amount of waste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67i4-_sXGcQ Claims $400/year, $35/month.
The distance from the heater to the shower is usually the biggest factor.
Same here! Moved to an appartement so everything is closer and now I don’t need to turn on the shower 5 business days before I want to shower
I’m in a SFH but all the bathrooms are very proximal to the heater so it slaps
Some apartments with central hot water have a recirculation pump, so the water is almost always hot. My building has one. The water is always hot, but for some fucking reason the hot water is like right next to the cold water, but the cold water doesn’t have a pump, so the cold water pipes will get hot from the flowing hot water. Then when I turn on my shower the cold water will be just as hot as the hot water… for like a minute, making the entire thing fucking pointless because you still have to wait to get in. But I can burn myself on demand so I’ve got that going for me.
I have my own water heater. Its an older appartment 😅 but that does sound quite inconvenient wow
I think some of the really fancy installs have a secondary tankless water heater for the shower…
I think I saw that somewhere.
No one mentioned (probably an assumed thing) to turn the water on full hot to let it warm up, then move it to the preferred mix position. Doesn’t waste the cold water which will stay more or less the same temp, it’s only flushing out the cold in the hot water line. And because you have it fully on hot, it takes less time.
Or get a tankless water heater to get it almost right away. I’ve seen debates on which is a better choice when factoring everything in, and I think it’s a close tie with no clear winner, each having their caveats.
The water in the pipes is still cold. Tankless heaters are endless, not instant. You still have to wait until the cold water is pushed out of the pipes, same as with a tank. Tankless heaters are still installed in the same central location as a tank and the hot water has to come from that point.
Well, there’s those suicide showerheads containing the heating element…
No thanks, I’ll use a toaster the old fashioned way.
This is true, but a lot of tankless sells advertise a feature that some have that recirculate the hot water so it’s available without the wait.
So some people assume it’s a feature all tankless have.
Most houses have a line going from the heater to the tap, not a loop, so the water just sits in the pipe waiting for pressure behind it to push it out of the tap. The cold water in the pipes can’t be recirculated. I suppose you could plumb a loop through the whole house and constantly rerun the cooling water through the heater but that kind of defeats the energy savings from a tankless heater. That loop becomes a really long skinny tank that’s right next to all of your taps.
In Asia these tankless heaters are in the shower room itself, when they are not turned on there’s no water in the pipe (in the part after the heating element).
or install a circulator so cold water in the hot water pipes get back into the tank to get reheated
I didn’t learn until my 40s that if you exhale gently while getting water on your face, none of it goes in your nose.
I think I learnt this when I was taught swimming as a child. You always slowly exhale or at least keep the air in your nose slightly under pressure while you’re underwater, so the water doesn’t get in.
If you do water somersaults you have to push harder when upside down since the air escapes!
Blowing bubbles is always the first thing I taught kids when they were learning to swim.
