Wacky things my dad says and believes

So my father is quite the character, he can be both offensive and charming at the same time. He's also a conspiracy nut and believes all sorts of non-sense. He basically subscribes to any fringe theory or writings. Luckily he's completely inept technologically so he's left with physical sources (books and other fringe or questionable publications). I thought I'd use this thread to keep a record of some of his crazy ideas, comments and conversations. All of this will be paraphrased but I'll try to keep to his words as best as I can remember.

Last night a typically benign subject came up, math.

Dad: I wonder how ancient societies; Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Sumerians etc. did mathematical calculations?
Me: What do you mean?
Dad: How did they do them?
Me: The same way we do it now, you know 1 + 1 = 2
Dad: But they didn't have our numbering system.
Me: So you want to know how they represented their numerical values?
Dad: Yeah, the Romans had Roman numerals but how do we know V actually meant five?
Me: Not sure but I'm sure you can find out, historians, anthropologists and certain mathematicians probably research that stuff, we've deciphered their languages I'm sure any unique numbering systems are also known.
Dad: So Romans how did they know that C + C equals 200?
Me: What?
Dad: As far as we know, C means 100, so how did they calculate C + C?
Me: What? It's math, it's the same as we do it today. Conceptually math is universal and the representation is irrelevant.
Dad: But they didn't have our numbers, how did they know C + C = CC or 200?
...
This kept going in circles for a while, my father, who is usually pretty intelligent, apparently doesn't understand mathematics as a concept.

Other fun stuff from last night:
Dad: Ancient Dionysian Architects had secret knowledge and created rooms where you could say something, then come back days later and still hear the echo of what you said.

Dad: Ancient Greek potters had similar secret understandings and could create pots where you could whisper into them and still hear what you said two days later.

Other random comments, many are as random in person as they appear to be here:
Dad: Music is fantastic, it's entirely based in mathematics and incredibly complex but is capable of creating such emotion, happiness, sadness. And that's why aliens don't understand it.

Dad: EARS, EARS, I WANT TO SEE EARS ON THE CANVAS! (said during one of the very early UFC events)

I wish my dad was more like yours. He doesn't understand math in the usual way, sadly.

Most of my friends who know my dad think he's awesome in a "He's hilarious and I'm glad he's not my dad" sort of way.

Incidentally I will likely be putting up some horribly offensive and racist things he says, please don't attribute them to me!

Which reminds me, in the context of the indigenous people protesting he said:
Dad: They're above the law, everyone is above the law except us. If you and I as white people blocked a highway what do you think would happen to us?

Yeah, he might not understand math, but he's asking questions that would never occur to most people.

Yeah, but he's asking them because he doesn't understand how math works. That's WHY it wouldn't occur to most people.

Brilliant!

I wonder if this is what Calvin's dad would be like in his old age.

I don't know how accurate this is, but for your dad I guess.

Roman addition, subtraction, etc.

Skip to the subheadings for specifics.

I think I've said this before, but the last time I saw my dad in person (2009 or early 2010, I think), he tried to pick a fight with me that Obama was trying to set up a constitutional monarchy with himself as king.

Dad used to be very liberal when I was growing up, but he's a long-haul truck driver and I think talk radio has caused him permanent brain damage.

My Dad believes Atlantis existed and that it was some super advanced society that regularly communicated with aliens who assisted in developing their technology. After its fall Atlanteans then went on to found Greece, Egypt and other great civilizations. Also that the pyramids are alien landing pads, he's never seen Stargate though.

My dad tried to get me to read the Mystery of the Crystal Skulls.

Yeah, like the Indiana Jones 4 skulls.

Showing him that link, Wikipedia or even this very simple version, probably won't help as it appears that his dad can't seem to understand that the Romans knew that C=100 because they created the system as the written form for mathematics before Arabic numerals existed. TheTrunkDr gave him the answer but he refuses to see it.

It's similar to the time my Grandmother asked how music was recorded onto vinyl. I explained the process, many times, but each time I was met with "Yes, but how does the sound get from the air onto the physical record" It was like trying to explain why the sky is blue to a child only to have them get pissy with you and ask "Yes, but why blue? Why not purple?" The only result is your head banging against a wall.

Get him to watch Close Encounters and report back.

Although, to be fair, Greek mathematics tended not to focus so much on arithmetic, geometry was more their thing. I was told that this was due to their being city states of small landowners, rather than merchants. So problems of area & volume were of more focus, which abstracted led to stuff like conic sections.

You should maybe point out that Euclid was the standard school maths text book for 2000 years, certainly until early 20th century. So we do maths in pretty much the same way... (axiom, definition, construction, proof)

The idea, in the west at least, of numbers as abstract things is pretty new actually. As wisebechlad mentions, numbers represented physical things such as a length.

To the OP, I understand what you're getting at I think but your dad is actually asking an interesting question and I would argue pretty much no one but mathematicians (and maybe some theoretical computer scientists and physicists) really understand the concept of math. Things most people take for granted, for example that integer addition or rational division works, is actually somewhat complicated and a very special case of something else. The algebraic notions of groups, rings and fields are very new so there really wasn't a good unifying system and set of axioms until fairly recently.

Fun bits of ancient math trivia:

The Babylonians used a base 60 number system but only had two symbols.

The Egyptians knew about rational numbers but they were always of the form 1/n (except for 2/3 for some reason) and it turns out you can represent any rational number as a sum of things like 1/n. Google Egyptian fractions for more.

All in all modern mathematics, even arithmetic, looks nothing like what existed even 300 years ago. Doing symbolic manipulation like we do today was considered cheating and not very rigorous.

This is why everyone should be required to read Courant and Robbins's What Is Mathematics? every five years. Or just once. That would be fine.

My dad believes only certain people should be permitted to vote. His criteria for this changes frequently but has included passing some sort of intelligence test, must be property owners, born citizens (ie no immigrants, even though he is one) and several others. What's funny is that he himself wouldn't qualify in some of his cases but he construes some reason why he'll always qualify, he didn't really mean all immigrants, just non-european immigrants or only immigrants that came after some arbitrary date or something similar.

If voting required an IQ test, most Republicans would never get elected.

Ah, the "everyone is stupid except me" clause.

This is very applicable to my father.

My dad is also a holocaust denier and believes the gas chambers were used for gassing clothes, bedding and other fabrics to eliminate lice and other pests. He claims the chambers weren't enough to kill all those people and that they'd still be gassing Jews today to his the 6 million mark.

Wow, your dad is really bad at mathematical concepts. =)

Oh man... I've had various lengthy rants about my father written and ready to go. They've all been deleted at the last moment due to a combination of sobriety/discretion/lack of appropriate thread. ONE OBSTACLE DOWN.

My dad is generally a sharp guy but he is a Republican because TAXES OMG. In the past he's been fairly reasonable; lately he's been buying into all kinds of wacky, reflexive right-wing nonsense, including Jack Welch's short-lived BLS truther conspiracy theory. Yes, the one where it's posited that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fabricating unemployment figures to help Barack Obama win reelection. I take it as an object lesson in how exclusive exposure to dogmatic "news" outlets can warp your perception of reality.

We don't talk politics anymore by mutual agreement. The last time was over the BLS thing and I called him a halfwit to his face.

My dad used to be a Republican due to his positions on fiscal policy, but he's proceeded to become more liberal as he's gotten older and less Republican as the party has gotten more crazy. He's a very down-to-earth, intelligent guy who doesn't have crazy ideas at all, or at least none that I know of. I actually quite enjoy discussing politics and social issues with him. You guys are missing out!

I don't want to start a fight or nothin', but there's a point where your father goes from being a funny old guy who thinks aliens are watching us and becomes a miserable old shit who believes truly disgusting things.

This statement is irreconcilable.

Yes, thank you, you can go back to third grade now.

Can't he be both?

As I said above he can be horribly offensive and racist. He thinks he's not racist because he "hates everyone equally" but no, he's flat out racist. He has terribly low opinion of current day immigrants and pines for the old days when European immigrants came and built up this country, though he also believes the white man is the cancer of the world.

How complicated was your explanation? Anything beyond "because air is blue" is going to be getting into deeper science than most people can intuitively grasp.

Well, yeah. Pests like Jews. Did you ask him why the Nazis needed so many extra clothes?

Oh no, the camps were real, they just didn't kill Jews by the millions in them. They were gassing the Jewish prisoners' clothes and bedding, not the Nazis'.

My dad is quite the contradiction. He believes the moon landing was faked, but that we still did actually land on the moon and have established a joint US and USSR (at the time) base on the far side. Also that we landed on Mars decades ago and that there's life there that the government is covering up.

Right, see, the Nazis were just doing Jewish people the favor of making sure their clothes were clean and pest-free.

Anyway yeah, your dad is now considerably less entertaining, Trunk.

I heard that one somewhere else recently, so I guess it's not unique. Still kind of bizarre, though, like saying the holocaust happened but Auschwitz was a fake replica of the real camps somewhere else.

Gotta hand it to the dude, he knows how to escalate and get to the punchline.

This debunk is REALLY good once he gets going. Basically he argues that the technology did not exist to fake the moon landing on video at the time.

Well, yeah, that's why they faked the moon landing in 1985 and sent the film back via time travel.

WAKE UP PEOPLE

Umm... no. He's right. That statement is irreconcilable.

My step mom: My daughter's friend used be married to a real jerk. He would hit her, he sold drugs and has been arrested a few times...

Dad: Let's tell it like it is, he's a nigger!

<it gets better, maybe 10 minutes later>

Dad: we've been watching this great British program about a Lord living in England and his servants. Life then was great, they're servants but they're very well respected, it wasn't a bad life at all. I think it's called Downton Abbey.

My wife: I don't know that a fictional TV show is a good representation of the life of servants at the turn of the last century. I'm sure most wealthy people didn't view their servants as equals to them.

Dad: Hey, don't be prejudice against the rich people now.

Guys! He already said his dad doesn't do the internet. Please print out wikipedia articles and put videos on VHS.

Oh haha he called some dude a nigger! LOL!! Man that is hilarious! Thanks for posting!

As a father of 20 somethings this thread has made me feel very good about myself.