Sunday, September 6, 2009

Current events

We went to a charity quiz night tonight.  I generally like quiz nights.  They can be annoying when you're stuck on a table with someone who is thick but doesn't realize it (Dunning-Kruger effect) so they keep writing down wrong answers. Not that I'm obsessed with winning.  Not at all.

Anyway, we completely destroyed the opposition tonight.  We broke them into small pieces then ate them then pooped them out and watched them get rolled away by dung beetles to rot underground and be slowly devoured by their larvae.  Ha ha!  It was the most awesome trivia team I have ever been part of.  On the team we had two medical students (me and my Smaller Half), three general practitioners, a professor of marketing, and a retired neurosurgeon.

Funny thing is though, we didn't come first.  We came second because throughout the night there were special "features" whereby teams could steal points from one another, and all the other teams chose to steal from us.  By the end of the night we'd lost our substantial lead and ended up losing by two points.  Even then, it should still have been a tie, but for two things.

First, in the "Pain Game" I was only able to attach 18 clothes pegs to my face in 30 seconds, whereas the winner attached 19 pegs.  I forgot my eyebrows, which was pretty dumb.  On the plus side, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get my picture in the paper with my face covered in clothes pegs.  The Dean of the medical school likes it when we engage with the local community, so I think he'll be really proud of me.

And the second thing that robbed us of the win was that one of the questions was marked incorrectly.  The question was, "True or false: electric current flows from the positive terminal to the negative terminal".  Everyone else at my table insisted that the answer was false because they were clever enough to know that the electrons flow from the negative to the positive.  But I explained to them that the question asked about current, and current is defined as the equivalent movement of positive charges.  I convinced them all to answer "True" and then it was marked as wrong.

What a bunch of crap.

Believe me folks - current flow is in the opposite direction to the movement of electrons.  I have a Masters degree in electrical engineering.  I know what I'm talking about.  Or you could read it in Wikipedia.

That prize rightly belongs to me.  Please mail it to "Pegface c/o School of Medicine".
 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The pun in your title is so awesome... I'm going to need a bex and a good lie down to recover.

-L :P

PTR said...

So it'll be a while before you're raisin' hell again?

Anonymous said...

I can't believe I got so old without ever stumbling on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

No more passively enduring god-awful "strategic" planning sessions for me. No sir. I'm gunna start handing out hats that say Dunning and Kruger.