It’s CPI, or Complete Prostration of Intellect. I have CPI a LOT!

I share your pain my friend. I was once talking with a group of friends and was trying to refer to the distance between the earth and the sun, when I slipped rather Freudianly (there were some cute girls in bikinis there) and said “anatomical unit” instead. The worst part of it was that I myself didn’t catch it right away. Not until another friend said he thought I was exaggerating again! We all had a good laugh at that one.

Makes it really difficult to be a social rebel in those cultures, because that implies the progenitors are wrong,,,

I expect our history of rebellion against the status quo impels us to be constantly re-examining our assumptions and that makes it easier to admit to mistakes and subsequently learn from them. I always liked Edisons response when someone asked him about his 2000 wrong approaches to making a light bulb that he had learned 2000 different ways it wouldn’t work and one that did.

Gary 7

Since we’re pointing out the worst silly mistakes we’ve made… when I was in third grade, I was in the school spelling bee, and I’d studied obscure words and hard-to-spell words like onomatopoeia. You can imagine how relieved I was when my first word to spell was sailboat! Whew! “Sailboat: S-A-L-E-B-O-A-T. Sailboat.” The word D’oh! comes to mind. >_>

In other story, in my AP Calculus class the teacher was handing out results of a school mandated standardized math test. Suddenly a girl sitting next to me exclaimed “Oh geez! I put your name where I should have put my name! I’m so stupid!” The teacher said “You know, I wasn’t going to bring that up.” She had a perfect score on that test by the way.

Knowing that was the wrong button to press after the fact doesn’t unpress the button. It’s an important lesson to learn.

Heheheh. Good time, that miniscule instant.

I’d say this deserves a video response.

What? I’m teaching my kids!

And I am still wondering, what would it smell like? I am imagining some person walking in a spacesuit on Titan’s surface. She equalizes the pressure in her suit to the pressure of the atmosphere. Then she lets in to her suit just a little bit of Titan’s atmosphere. What will that smell like? And, how poisonous is this atmosphere anyway?

I loved those videos, Phil. Looking forward to the third one.

J/P=?

I think that making mistake is natural and people should be less ashamed of it. Sure you’re a professional, but you’re induced by the question (that made an erroneous assumption) to a mistake. That is no problem, no one is right all the time, and when the mistake is found you correctly assumed your responsibilities and got out in public and corrected it.

Of course it would have been worst if we were grading you, but a lower grade is the consequence of mistaking in an exam. Low grades are bad, but they are not the end of the world, they just mean that you must study harder for the next test.

As it’s you, we’ll pretend we didn’t notice.
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