Pet peeves…
What are your pet peeves? I’ll give you some of mine.
Alex, do you believe in UFOs?
Okay, what are you asking me? Are you asking if I believe there are objects in the sky that cannot be positively identified? Or are you asking me if I believe we are being visited by alien spacecraft? A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object. It could be an alien spaceship. Or it could be a weather balloon, or a projection of lights, or…. (As an aside note, I’ll answer the latter since we’re already talking about it. Although I don’t discount the possibility that we are not alone in the universe, there is pretty much a total absence of physical evidence of such, outside of unverifiable hearsay witness accounts and speculative interpretation of explainable physical phenomena. And frankly, outright hoaxes.)
Officer: “Your honor, the defendant was traveling a high rate of speed.”
Fine - the defendant was accelerating quickly, but was he going too fast? If the defendant was driving at a constant one hundred miles per hour, he was traveling at a high speed. But at a zero rate of speed. Rate of speed implies acceleration.
Alex, how much do you weigh in kilograms?
Long sigh. Again, what are you asking me? Are you asking what my weight is in SI (‘metric’) units, or are you asking me what my mass is? A kilogram is the base unit of mass in SI units. One kilogram weighs 9.8 newtons - and 2.2 lbs, both of which are units of weight, and are forces, not masses. Oh - trivia question, what is the base unit of mass in the English system? Most people don’t know this. It’s the slug. One slug has a weight of 32.2 lbs. There is a secondary unit of mass in English units called a pound-mass (lbm) which is one slug numerically divided by 32.2 but without the gravitational constant unit to make force/mass calculations in English customary units ‘easier.’ Actually it just makes it easier to make a huge mistake, by a factor of 32.2.
“He’s armed with an AK 47!”
I doubt it. I’m sure he’s armed with some form of AK pattern assault rifle, more likely to be an AKM or its Chinese copy. When the Soviets developed a post WWII assault rifle to replace the SKS, they wanted something lighter and cheaper to make so they decided they wanted a stamped steel receiver. The short story is that after two initial limited production runs (the Type 1 and Type 2 AK) they decided they couldn’t make it work and went with a high quality, milled steel receiver and adopted that as the AK 47. At some point they resolved the issues with the stamped steel receiver, quit producing the AK 47, and called the new model the AKM. That was the model that was mass produced and exported all over the world, and many variants were produced by several countries. There is a long version to the story, but I’ll save it for later for those so interested. This is actually Bruce Highland’s peeve.
“That’s not barbecue! That’s grilling!”
Okay. I suppose it sounds a bit picky like the previous peeve, but some purists believe that the term ‘barbecue’ or ‘BBQ’ is reserved solely for smoked meats. Some will even limit it to beef and not pork or chicken. I think most of us can agree that ‘barbecue’ can include grilling over charcoal. Or smoking in a gas fired or electric smoker. Hmm, that could be contentious. I said most of us. There will be some that will disagree. And feel free to - you can post comments to this blog you know.
