Another post from betting market company Polymarket read: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.” The post has almost 14 million views.
People making jokes about dihydrogen monoxide, and imma be honest, I feel like it should have been the gold standard internet stupidity filter that disqualifies your credentials in any form of discussion because of the insane amount of people that fell for it back when the internet was still new.
If you couldn’t handle H2O, you can’t be trusted to use the internet seriously lol.
I had a high school teacher my freshman year play the “dihydrogen monoxide” joke on our class. this was before i had any chemistry knowledge so i sadly fell for it. -It was still funny.
That wasn’t a study AFAIK it was the official report from the U.S. Department Of Education. -The department run by the spouse of a professional wrestling magnate.
Naw, my 6th grade was on the ground floor and so is my house. I read at the same level.
Touché
Every sixty seconds in Communist New York, a minute passes.
Next he’ll be forcing us all to drink dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical that’s known to be fatal to humans under certain conditions!
Sources claim an up to 100% mortality rate!
Water? like from the toilet?!
Yuck! It has no electrolytes!
It’s what we and plants crave!
They literally use that shit to power steam engines! Now imagine what it does to your insides. Nasty, nasty stuff.
Water? Don’t touch the stuff… fish fuck in it
Dont forget it is a key component in both hydrochloric acid and making nuclear power plants operate.
And its much more dangerous to try to breathe than carbon monoxide.
I’m sorry but as a technicality none of the power used in a steam engine is derived from the dihydrogen monoxide. The chemical compound is used as a medium to turn thermal energy into kinetic energy. The thermal energy, likewise, is usually obtained from another source such as chemical, nuclear, or photovoltaic.
Good luck running your steam engine without it!
Also:
tidal
Pretty sure there aren’t moon-powered trains, bro, but nice try.
A steam engine can also be used to generate power, as a stationary device, but in hindsight the tidal power probably never gets that hot. The engine for moving trains could also be powered by electricity from wind or tidal, though I don’t think there are any practical examples.
A friend of mine ingested a ton of it and died. They found him at the bottom of a lake
Thry say even small amounts are fatal in certain circumstances.
Arabic Numerals have taken over the world! When will this madness stop? /s
Especially that diabolic number “zero”. It is a pure Arab invention. The Romans did fine without it. Then the Arabs introduced zero and we know what happened with the Roman Empire. Now, zeros can be found everywhere - they can even hide in computers. America should really exzerminate these zeros befote it is too late!!
OMG! They divided!
In Germany, we have a right-wing party en par with the US Republicans: The AfD. Just as Nazi, just as nuts.
Some time ago, someone riled them up with the “Did you know they teach Arabic numerals in school now?”, and quite a few of them blew a lid…
You know what’s funny, the dihydrogen-monoxide bit works in part because when you tell someone “ha ha, you’re anti water” they should get embarrassed. Like, it’s impossible for them to continue arguing, you know?
But if anyone is going to take hidden-agenda numerals at face value and still insist that we use a new, much stupider number system to get away from centuries of Arabic influence, it would definitely be nazis, lol.
Well, the dihydrogen monoxide that is in your Zuchini is literally an industrial solvent!
Have you seen what dihydrogen monoxide does to pure, strong iron?!? It corrodes iron unbelievably fast! And people just…consume it in most of their “healthy” foods!
Wake up, sheeple! Stop drinking dihydrogen monoxide!
~/s - this message brought to you by Brawndo, the thirst mutilator~
FWIW this is by far less dangerous and aggressive than oxygen, which caused the first global mass extinction when it started to amass in earth’s atmosphere (and plays a major role in the corrosion of iron you mentioned).
And yet people tell you to breathe in and out…Oxygen? Oh, you mean rocket fuel?
zuchini is green squash now
My son just told me there is a complete wiki about DHMO. Something I’ll investigate later…
And stop plants from drinking it too!
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
Next they are going to find out they are learning other Arabic topics like al-Gebra.
Or about Mr. Al Kwarizmi (Algorithm).
How about Brahmagupta’s quadratic equation
No, ain’t no way, how can this be NOT the onion ?! Come on ! 😂
Newsweek
i heard he’ll teach kids the “latin” alphabet instead of Amerian one😡
If they force Arabic numerals and the Latin alphabet on our children, I’m leaving!
I dont understand this. When I was in Palestine, they definitely used different numerals.
Like, I guess they invented base 10? Or math? But the characters they use for numbers are absolutely different
Basically, what we call “Arabic Numerals”, including the number 0, have their origin in India. Europe got them from Arabic scholars, and therefore called them “Arabic”.
The main factor is the decimal system of writing and having the concept of a zero in contrast to the odd, additive and subtractive writing of the Roman numerals, which didn’t even know a 0, and made multiplication a pain and division nearly impossible.
What glyph is actually used for a one, be it a 1 or a ١, is absolutely secondary.
I want to correct something. They knew what nothing meant. They just didn’t conceptualize the absence of things as a number. And honestly, it’s a bit weird, but it is useful. You can’t have 0 apples, but the concept is useful for math.
I have 0 apples right now, and most of the time!
Arguably, sure. The way they’d understand it is you don’t have apples though, not that you have zero. With our understanding, it makes some sense, but I’d say even today that’s odd to say. It isn’t wrong, but it is strange to say you posses everything in the universe (and anything else too), just in quantities of zero. It makes more sense to say you don’t possess them.
I think your confusion is the other side of what the article was discussing.
The problem is, there have been a lot of number systems in the past. The one we currently use is based on the Arabic system. In common usage you would simply call them numbers. But in a technical sense, to distinguish from other numbering systems past and present, they’re also called Arabic Numerals because that’s their origin.
Clearly this ignores the fact Arabic is still around and using real Arabic numbers and that is both confusing and maybe problematic. But I think the technical reason it sticks around is to acknowledge their source and have a more specific term when there is a need
called Arabic Numerals because that’s their origin
While the origin of Arabic numerals is actually Indian.
Arabic Numerals is ambiguous. We don’t use eastern Arabic numerals in our schools.
Looking at Wikipedia, we’re talking about western Arabic numerals in Europe/USA (TIL). Did you use one of the versions listed here as Eastern arabic numerals? Briefly reading the history, eastern is more common across modern Arabic regions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numeralsOk, well, this article is trying to call people dumb for not understanding a concept that is incredibly confusing to everyone
They’re not calling people dumb for not knowing, they’re calling them dumb for not investigating. If you hear a wild claim, you should investigate. This shouldn’t still work because most of us here know it’s been a running joke for at least 20 years in the US with continuous anti-Muslim and anti-middle-easter/Arabic sentiment and bills post 9/11.
It shouldn’t be incredibly confusing, either. It’s fine to not automatically know that Amerocan/English refers to “western Arabic numerals” as simply “Arabic numerals” in shorthand. I didn’t. That’s why I briefly researched it when you said you had a different set of numerals in a region. Since I don’t know exactly what to look for to validate my own searches, I genuinely asked you if what you learned matched what was in the Wikipedia page. I have no direct experience.
People use shorthand all the time. It makes things confusing. I didn’t know a “convection oven” was actually a “forced convection oven” until this year. In my head, it wasn’t something I ever questioned because all my ovens have had the primary heater at the bottom, meaning convection would carry hot air upwards. Turns out, FCOs have a fan at the top to force better circulation. Surprise, this revolution of air fryers? They’re just countertop [forced] convection ovens. Similarly, I have a gripe with people customizing cars with “coilovers”. The majority of cars already have coil[spring]-over-[shock]s, but what they mean is “adjustable coilovers”. It’s a carryover from when cars did NOT have the various coilover designs as standard. Shocks outside coil springs, leaf springs, torsion springs, etc.
The “everyone” in your sentence does not really fit. A “me” would be more on point.
incredibly confusing to everyone
Is it? I think your confusion may come from living or studying abroad, which is understandable. But only the ignorant ones who passed school while asleep on this side of the world would be confused. Everyone is told that these are Arabic numerals as opposed to Roman numerals very early on.
Name does not check out.
TL;DR - People are stupid
She must be an ICE supervisor by now
Isn’t that Linda McMahon, the head of the Department of Education?
Oh…I didn’t know that’s the point we were at in all this…
It’s worse than that. We’ve passed that point already.
and blow Bubbas?
So, there WAS an onion (or similar) article stating exactly this like the day after he won. So it looks like some of these idiots just ate the onion
Whole thing is just media hyping up an obvious prank so that the stupidest people start freaking the fuck out, which gets more media attention, which makes us click on links way out here in backwater Lemmy.
This is the uroboros of media that has wrecked our whole society, where all of our impressions about just about anything are being dictated by the smallest, most ridiculous outlier reactions. Remember the kitty litter boxes in schools?
This is what launched flat-eartherism and trumpism and the whole massive “incel movement” that has become a tidal-wave of depressing idiocy, which get more attention for being so disgusting and stupid, which makes people on the other extreme end of the bell-curve over-react, which gets more attention, which leaves normal, passive readers thinking this is how people are really interacting and treating each other, which leads to them also taking up radical or stupid ideas about the world.
It’s not that The Onion can’t compete with reality, its that The Onion can’t compete the vast media empire built on deliberately turning every possible unusual reaction or hot take from random nobodies into headline news. Before panic was monetized, most outlets ignored pranks.
I know several ignorant relatives who would seethe with rage seeing that headline…
An easy way to sort out the idiots who probably did not learn Arabic numerals in school, and therefor are so useless they can only be employd as MAGA heads…
Get me the fuck off this planet.
And then in astronomy, students are being forced to learn the Arabic names of stars (like Sirius, Deneb and Betelgeuse).
Lmao, I love this kind of stuff. It makes dumb people so angry
Angering dumb people makes them vote. And they vote real dumb
They were angry before this and they’ll have been angry if this was never mentioned.
For those willing to learn, there’s an opportunity for a teachable moment
I love that too, but I feel like we have to make them smart and not angry :(
You can’t fix stupid
Fuck man! It’s called school!
That mindset is just so disappointing… I mean, why would you even say that? It’s like a statement that immediately backfires, because it makes it sound like you’re the one not thinking!
But you can teach the ignorant.
Only if they’re willing to learn. 😢
We are fucked, aren’t we 🤔
Willing and able, which isn’t the case for any of those people.
Literally what schools are for (in this context where you are using stupid as a synonym for uneducated)
You cannot teach a pig to sing. Well, you can teach, but don’t expect it to work…
And it makes dumb people so visible.
Again? They do this whenever a nonwhite person is voted into office.
