Somehow, we've managed to survive to the present day despite having encountered a lot of foolishness. Now and then though, I wonder how.
Fool 1:
Somebody whom I once had the misfortune to know in college told me that fire ants secrete Vitamin C.
Yep! Those ants secrete formic acid and "as everyone knows", that stuff is Vitamin C. Of course, Vitamin C is really ascorbic acid but this fool was irreversibly and adamantly insistent with his misinformation.
On another day, this same fool came along carrying a glass jar filled with sugar cubes. He said that the sugar cubes were laced with LSD and asked if anybody wanted one. I said there were only two possibilities. Either there really was LSD in those sugar cubes in which case the guy was a sh.....k or there wasn't any LSD in those sugar cubes in which case the guy was a sh.....k.
I never did find out which it was.
Fool 2:
Somebody else once told me that a Collins Radio transceiver called the KWM-2 had this wonderful design feature called "ALC" which he said stood for Automatic Loading Control. It was even printed in the KWM-2 instruction manual. Just open the book and there it is, "ALC", right there, clearly printed on glossy paper in irrefutable black and white.
Yep. According to this guy, Collins Radio had engineered the transmitter's RF output stage using a pair of 6146 beam power tetrodes working in class AB1 for which the grid drive and the pi-network plate tuning were automatically adjusted as required for whatever operating frequency you would set using just the VFO (Variable Frequency Oscillator) control knob. You didn't have to bother adjusting anything else.
My pointing out that "ALC" actually stood for Automatic Level Control and that he really needed to pay proper attention to amplifier tuning was simply dismissed as the unfortunate product of my own ignorance.
I never did find out how long a pair of 6146 tubes would last in there before their red-hot plates would collapse.
Fool 3:
I needed to telephone my wife at her work one day where she taught school. When I dialed and asked for her by name, the school's telephone receptionist told me there was no such person in the school. My wife's maiden surname, which she used professionally, was of one syllable which the school receptionist had misheard (Think of Stein versus Stern, Blum versus Bloom or Reed versus Ride.) and so I repeated the name very, very carefully, including its five letter spelling, and still this receptionist got it wrong and insisted that there was no such person in the school.
After yet another go around with the same outcome, I remembered the name of a someone else in the school's office and asked to speak with that person instead. That was accepted and I was transferred so I could pass along a message.
Later, my wife told me that she had actually been there in the office when I called and had wondered if the incoming caller might have been me. She got distracted by something else though and only when we later compared notes did we realize what that super-dense receptionist had done.
Now please see the following search result URL and wander around a bit through the various links:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=CPAC+vaccination&form=PRUSEN&ocid=oie9fvrt&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&msnews=1&rec_search=1&refig=f3167445d7894f2b84d3a25c98c1b3ae&sp=-1&pq=cpac+vaccination&sc=1-16&qs=n&sk=&cvid=f3167445d7894f2b84d3a25c98c1b3ae
Then, with all of the above freshly in mind, have you met any anti-vaxxers lately?
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