“Blood inside the veins is blue, -because it hasn’t been exposed to air. And air oxidizes it turning it red.”

I feel dumber just for typing out what someone said to me once.

[you can learn a lot from the internet… But just quick advice…yahoo answers should never be your go-to solution.   For all its shamed, Wikipedia is a good source of reliable information (provided you have enough basic intelligence to search for the right things)]

I had a big argument with not just 1 but 4 of my former colleagues.

One of these colleagues by the way, was a former nurse.

I think now we know why she was a former rather than current.

Jesus. The lack of thinking of some people is incredible.

Even people that you thought were smart, you realise they’ve simply had more education than other people, but this further education still hasn’t (somehow) taught them to think rationally.
In this case they’ve simply remembered more details and thus they’ve been ‘educated’

Oh and I thought I might point out that these people were not Chinese. For the lack of rational thinking, Chinese people can be forgiven somewhat due to their generally terrible education system which focuses on remembering facts and regurgitating them at will.
Which to be fair, was and sometimes still is very important in what they need to do.  And of course with everything you’ve seen…history seems to be showing that many Chinese simply regurgitate the information they’ve been fed, despite it being obviously not true, something that a quick logical check would prove.

But no, these were 4 foreigners.  What’s more, fellow educators.  Another reason to feel sorry for Chinese students in China, they’re not just getting mis-information from their own educators but from the foreign ones too.
Poor, poor Chinese people

Anyway, there were 2 British people, 1 American person, and the nurse was from Mexico. (that woman was strange, and not because she was from Mexico…just, she was strange.)

Anyway, I think I know where this thought came about that blood going in was blue and blood outside the body is red, it’s something like a science diagram that is written into some biology books.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/27585-human-body-system-circulation-infographic.html
It’s meant to make it easier to understand how blood going ‘in’ (passing the lungs) is not enriched with oxygen, and how afterwards it is.

It says “Veins (blue) carry oxygen-poor blood back to the heart”
“Arteries (red) carry oxygen-rich blood from the heart through the body”

It is the colour-coding they’ve used so that you could, or at least should be able to distinguish how each one carries either oxygen-rich or poor blood around the body. Not the colour of the actual blood inside those veins/ arteries.

In fact it’s the same as when you study mechanics the first diagram they give you is this: 
source http://www.formula1-dictionary.net/direct_injection.html

To describe how fuel and air pass through the engine and then gets transformed into exhaust.
This of course doesn’t mean that petrol and air is actually yellowish blue, and that exhaust is brown, …. It’s just the colour coding of the diagram.

It’s assumed that if you’re studying basic principles of engines, you should have already seen the colour of petrol. – Which is light purple, or light green for diesel, and this is only because of the additives they add in it to change the colour, and it changes on each country too. For example these colours are only for Australia. In France for example Marine Diesel is blue.  You should not be so dim to think that this represents the natural colour of the product.

One person I was arguing against said, “well why is it that I can see that veins are blue in colour, huh?”
(whilst the 3 others looked on with interest)

From which I paused for a while, trying to see if there was more than curiosity behind their eyes… was this a trick? Was it a joke? Or did they really not know?

“Errr… didn’t any of you take physics in high-school?”

Ok so that answer was a no. Turns out Physics is a ‘smart’, poncy subject which apparently many societies don’t put much importance on because they’d rather focus on literature and philoshophy… rather than learning and understanding how things work and interact in our universe.

And whilst, many would say …”each to their own”

I, on the other hand can’t just let stupidity stand, otherwise it seems to fester and spread, and before you know it the human race ends up moving back in intelligence not forward.

“Well, your veins are blue because of the concept of refraction, it’s the same phenomenon that explains why the sky and the ocean is blue.”

Here you can see a twinkle in their eyes. …’There’s a chance of them comprehending’ ,I’m thinking

You can see cogs beginning to turn.

“You don’t think individual air particles are blue in colour do you?, and you’ve seen that water isn’t actually blue, so why is it?”

More cogs turning.

“The reason is that certain frequencies of light will pass through various thicknesses of layers of light-permeable material at different angles”

“For the sky at least, you know it’s not just pure oxygen up there?   In fact between ‘space’ and us there is increasing densities of air, nitrogen, oxygen CO2 all this kind of stuff and it creates layers of air, and the frequencies of light that are higher refract the more (bend the more) and therefore is the one that reflects more in whatever medium it is in.  Reds, oranges, yellows, all penetrate, each refracting and reflecting.  But blue through certain material, has even more chance of reflecting.  ….For our atmosphere, and our oceans…again, this is blue..  and guess what, for your veins, it’s the same.

The actual colour of your veins is an opaque white, the colour inside them is red, however this combined with the density and pigment of your various layers of skin basically shows different variations of a blue colour.”

Ok so the cogs were turning, but obviously a twig got caught in there halfway or something. Because they were crunching and not really turning anymore by the time I finished.

Silence, until “no I’m pretty sure they’re blue because the blood inside is blue.
Ask Marisella, she was a nurse, she’ll know for sure”

Ah…. Ok… “so Marisella, what do you say?”

“Well, actually”, says Marisella matter-of-factly, “spent blood is more of a purple colour”

Errr… no Marisella, unfortunately it’s not, unfortunately because before I believed you when you said you were a nurse previously, and now.. I just think you’re a crackpot.

“errrr… well, I don’t know what to say”

I was dumbfounded, because of these people’s stupidity, and in particular from this ‘Nurse’s’

And then they pounced.. “well yeah,” one of them tried to accommodate me…now trying to ‘teach me’, “if you cut yourself it comes out red because its oxygenating when it comes into contact with the air”

Even the supposedly ‘educated one’ was nodding now.

“Errr… well, what about when you give blood? Or do a blood test?” I probed.

“Yeah it’s red”

“Yes but think about it, inside the syringe is a vacuum, there is no air in there, is there?  That’s what creates the sucking ability… the fact that there’s no air… yet it’s still red, isn’t it?”

Ooo cogs began slowly turning again but then a look a pain across 2 of their faces, and the ‘nurse’ said “well I’m going to get some food.. maybe some red food”

Eeerrrr did they learn a lesson?  Did they find out some new information? Did they learn to question their immediate thought when they first looked at an old biology diagram, and try to apply some rationality and logic to it to give it more than a moment’s thought?
No.
They just gave up, because it was all too difficult, and apparently it didn’t really affect their lives.

Aarrgghh!  How can people go on reflecting this level of stupidity?

This is the real stupidity, not ‘not being smart’ because they haven’t studied a lot of things, because they can’t remember and regurgitate out so many facts, but because people just don’t think enough, they just don’t apply enough rational and logical thinking to huge aspects of their life and situations around them.

In this case it doesn’t matter how much rational thinking, logic and science you drop on people… sometimes they just don’t want to believe you.