Pearoast - 'scuse please...
Anyone with wilful ignorance of the amazing world/universe we inhabit. Especially those who think that either science-fiction is stupid, or that liking it has somehow rendered me completely clueless. I have a picture of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/) as my desktop backdrop at work. Whenever I get frustrated because I can't get the code to do what I want, or I'm having rounding errors in the 5th decimal place that are screwing up fund/unit calculations, I just call it up, and gaze at 10,000 galaxies for a few seconds, to get a bit of perspective on the situation. When a co-worker asked me what the image was, I tried to explain that it was a picture of a tiny, tiny slice of the night sky.
"So are they stars?"
"No, they're galaxies."
"Are they like stars?"
".........well, they're made of stars...."
"Well, I've never seen anything like that in the sky!"
"...no.... you wouldn't, really..."
"So it's not real then? You've just grabbed that off some Star Trekkie website! You must think I'm stupid!"

Almost as bad was the one who saw the photo of Neptune taken by the Voyager probe, which is another of my 'perspective' pictures. It's just a couple of crescents - Neptune and Triton, but this photo was taken looking back towards Neptune. Here's this tiny spacecraft, still taking pictures and sending signals, as the probe left the solar system and headed out into deep space.
"What's that - abstract art or something?"
"No, it's Neptune and Triton, taken by Voyager as it was leaving the solar system."
Moment of puzzled silence as he looks at me, waiting for the leg-pull. When it doesn't come, he responds, quite slowly and carefully, like he's about to shatter my dreams:
"It's a TV show. It's not real."
"No, it's real, I got it off the NASA website."
"Yeah, but NASA went to the moon. Voyager's just a TV show.

Sometimes I just have to say "Go away now, please." because otherwise I'm going to hit someone, or they're going to see me cry.
(Leo Sasquatch hates being the grown-up, Thu 18 Mar 2010, 20:32, 2 replies)

Oh god.
I once argued with my teacher in year 6 because she insisted that the Sun is the only star in the universe, and I couldn't make her realise she meant the only star in the solar system.
( Bob Todd whee, Thu 18 Mar 2010, 21:19, closed)

I completely agree!
How anyone can look at the night sky, or pictures of distant galaxies and not be totally overwhelmed by the beauty and scale is beyond me.

It's genuinely dissapointing when people don't even look up, or say things like "It's just stars, innit".
(friedel, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 10:06, closed)