h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have two (no three) pet hates:
1) People claiming the melenium started in 2000. (I'll kill 'em. I'll kill 'em all!) (see http://www.douglasadams.com/ and fing the pedants article)
2) Relegious TV Programs. I just don't like them.
3) People ignoring you in the middle of a sentence

John

Well, you just got one of my pet hates. If you're gonna crow on about the millennium one way or another, spell it right! Most people get closer than you did, but leave out the second n.

Sorry.
I'm dislexic (sp), so at least I have an excuse
I thought of another pet hate today: Weekend drivers and crowded shoping centers. Hate 'em. The people should take it upon themselves to get out of the way and disintgrate quietly in a corner somewhere.

John

My pet hate is a bit of a wierd one:
It's 'low fat' foods, which say on their label something like '75% FAT FREE!!!' My argument is, if they are 75% fat free, that means they are 25% fat. A *quarter* of that food is *solid* fat.
It's not the fat thing that bothers me - I dispute the generally held viewpoint that fat is bad for you, I think it's another horrible product of commercialism - it's the lying in advertising that I hate. They're trying to convince people that the product is low fat, but relative to other foods it's very high fat.
It's silly, I know, and my housemate is annoyed with me 'cos apparently I go on about it in fact he's taken to screaming when I mention it!

I just can't stand people who won't let bygones be bygones and accept that the majority of the people in this world seem to want to celebrate 2000 as the millennium. The way I see it, the calendar we're using is based on the year in which the major figgure of the religionthat *happens* to be dominant on the planet *might* have been born. It's purely arbitrary. Popular opinion. So now popular opinion wants to forget that we never had a year zero, in order to make 2000 the millennium (sp?). So be it. The purists will have their smug little parties on the upcoming new year's eve, celebrating an event that everyone else celebrated a year ago. They'll be right, but they'll be rather lonely, and won't have all the fireworks and such.

Besides, what everyone's really celibrating is the day the numbers changed

Hehe, even if you wanted to celebrate because of the 2000-year anniversary of that certain person, you'd be wrong a couple ways from what I understand. First, they didn't go back to figure out the year of birth until about 700 or so, and they got it wrong by a few years. The consensus is now he was born somewhere between 7 and 4 bc by our current calendar. The day is also wrong. Apparently he was born in March, or possibly late February. The late December date is older than the religion that claims it; the day was moved in order to coincide with this old pagan holiday, make it easier to convert people.

And of course the most current version of this calendar we use wasn't made so until sometime in the 1600s as I recall. They put in a bunch of days to account for previously unaccounted for leap years and such. So the bottom line is it's been fiddled with enough and been wrong enough that who really cares. All the numbers changed, and that is indeed the cool bit IMHO.

In the 1600s in the UK they took out one day, I can't remember which, but they did something like jump from a Sunday to a Tuesday one week to account for unaccounted leap years. The people rioted, thinking that a day of their lives was being stolen from them

And just think of how many people would actually be Happy to lose a monday now!!!

I thought it was 9 days or thereabouts. To some extent, the anger was understandable. Apparently, people beleived what they'd been told - that the dates of their deaths had been preordained and written down in some great book, and so they'd lose out if the calendar was adjusted. However, it seems no-one pointed out that if an all-knowing god did exist, he/she/it would have known in advance that the calendar would be going to be changed, and would have made appropriate adjustments.

People whose clinching argument is that “The majority of people believes it, so just let it go”.

So applying this logic we arrive at:

1) The Earth was flat and the centre of the universe until everyone (read the Church) decided it wasn’t.
2) Humphrey Bogart does say “Play it again Sam.” in Casablanca.
3) 21st Century does start this year.
4) The risk of contracting BSE is higher than the risk of death by falling down stairs.

Just because the majority of people accept a misconception does not make it any more true

The whole point of pet hates is that they are things that don’t really matter but they wind some people up.

That's because people can't take the pole out of their backside. Sir Bedivere (which I believe is the original spelling, but could be wrong), what you need to realize is that (especially in cases where it makes absolutely jack difference) what people percieve as truth is often more important than what is actually "true". (What a run-on.)

And for my little bit of anality:

I hate internet spelling. "i'll c u!" and "cuz u told me 2" and so on. It just looks so stupid... especialy when people can't take the third of a second to hit shift before pressing "i". Oh well.

Oooh, that's a good one! I hate that too, both the ridiculous spelling and lowercase "I" and so on. Apparently they don't care that it makes them look lazy/ignorant/downright stupid.

Ahh, I believe you understand the point exactly.

A good example of what you say is that in science light is treated as a wave in one circumstance (i.e. to explain Interference) and a particle in another (i.e. explain light pressure). So here a belief is more important that the truth of the matter (no pun intended).

As to the spelling of my name, well I am not too sure as I took it from Python and that’s how it is in the script.

Funnily enough, it is also one of my sister’s pet hates, as people will insist in changing the spelling of her name on forms etc. One of mine to do with this is that people will correct me on the pronunciation of her name when they have known her 5 minutes.

As to the "i'll c u!" and "cuz u told me 2”, couldn’t agree more. Another one to do with this must be the all lower case (or upper case) no punctuation e-mails that a user of mine sends.

A new pet hate is the 40 mph drivers. You’ll be driving down a perfectly straight road on a clear dry day and the person in front will be doing 40 mph, when 60 mph is legal and quite safe. Of course you can’t over take them as there is traffic coming the other way. So you resign yourself that this person is only driving at a speed that they feel is safe, BUT when you get to a 30 mph zone they still drive at 40 mph!!!!

On the topic of wave/particle duality, the truth depends on what you're trying to measure, rather than the strength of your belief.

Considering bad net spelling and punctuation, I guess some culprits may actually be semi-literate in real life, and the others just think it's cool (or should that be 'kewl'). The fact that to everyone else they appear as undereducated children seems to have escaped them.

Somebody's been twisting my words! No, the earth is not flat because it's round and empirical evidence proves it is round and there's no arguing there. But the Millennium and the dates on a calendar are arbitrary -- a matter of circumstance and public opinion to begin with! So if it started with public opinion, public opinion certainly has some say it what it ends with! Public opinion has never held sway over where the center of the Universe actually *is*, but it was man who decided when the year one was, so if man wants to change that, or igonre it, LET HIM!

My point exactly.
*snaps agreement*

I always wonder how many people have actually done the tests themselves when they recite a popular scientific truism.

I believe the earth's not flat, but only because of pictures from space missions and stuff I've read. I've not personally gone out and proved to my own satisfaction that it's not flat, so I'm just doing the same thing as people who thought the earth was flat centuries ago, i.e. just going along with the concensus.

On the other hand I *have* looked into this persistent myth surrounding plugholes and the Coriolis force. There's a fine example of a 'scientific fact' which is exceptionally easy to disprove, and yet people believe it due to a combination of repetition and sounding scientific.

There's a web site http://www.badastronomy.com which attempts to dispel various astronomical myths, among other things.

Then there are the kind of scum who wheelspin out of a side road in front of you while you're barrelling along at 60, then settle down to a nice comfartable 30 (traffic coming the other way, so no chance of overtaking). Just to make things EVEN worse, there is a HUGE gap in traffic behind you, so if they'd only waited 5 seconds they'd be able to pull out properly and not hold you up either!

Obviously I meant 'comfortable' rather than 'comfartable'. Sorry.