80 Mph

[mark_j]

What color was George Washington's white horse?

I've stumped a surprising number of people with that one too...

Selective hearing/reading. People hear or read 1 word in 5 but can get the gist of the conversation from those snippets. I remember reading something about a whole study that was done on this somewhere..

Quite fascinating actually.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

It's called innumeracy, the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy.

This is shocking to see, since the answer is in the question. And why they should find the speed question unsolvable when being quick on the steak question deeply puzzles me.

Hard not to laugh while watching the video, though.

Sometimes personal experience is so indelibly stamped on a person's consciousness that it impinges upon rational thought. That obviously happened in the video.

The girl was a runner, and her knowledge of her normal running pace was such that she attempted to rationalize an answer to the question rather than using math at all.

I had a similar experience once as a teenager. We owned an early model VW beetle (yeah, we're talking loooong ago). Back then those cars did not have a gas gauge. They had a floor mounted lever that accessed a reserve fuel tank when the car ran out of gas.

I forget how far the car could go on the reserve fuel, but it had been put on reserve the day before I was driving home one night, knowing I needed to get gas soon.

But I was on a busy highway with numerous gas stations, and somehow I reasoned that the farther I went without filling up, the more miles per gallon I would be getting on a normal tank of gas for the same amount of money.

The illogical assumption from which I was suffering was that I was only calculating mpg on the main fuel tank. In my mind, the reserve tank was always present and full of fuel.

Later when I made my argument to my parents, my mom pointed out that when I was finally filling up with gas, the first thing that was replenished was the reserve tank. "How else," she asked, "do you think fuel gets in there?"

For a know-it-all high school senior, such questions are more than a trifle embarrassing.

 

[Que]

That may be the saddest thing I've ever seen.

She was rather hot though.

My brain and my penis are in a tug of war.

That is the cost of having a penis. Only enough blood to run one.

 

[Balladeer08]

Sometimes personal experience is so indelibly stamped on a person's consciousness that it impinges upon rational thought. That obviously happened in the video.

The girl was a runner, and her knowledge of her normal running pace was such that she attempted to rationalize an answer to the question rather than using math at all.

But there are dozens of those videos, it isn't just the one girl.

I wish he'd thought to ask her the steak question.

It gives me the feeling that I've stumbled onto an interesting sociological situation. Gender-based math, or something like that.