Based on my maiden name, J's mental image of my mom was a black militant Muslim woman.

Your maiden name is X?

People's sole reason for believing my friend G and I are sisters? We both have curly red hair (that we both dye). We do have slightly similar colored eyes.

When my sister was visiting me my freshman year of college, the person checking her into the dorm looked at our IDs and asked, "Are you sisters?" We said yes, and she looked at us sceptically and asked, "Full sisters?"

OK skipping and skimming, because this tiny thing I encountered in my research is too funny not to share. Economists studied a program that has previously been discussed in the popular press. But I think it so offended their economic souls that they found a way to describe it without saying what was actually happening. Basically people were told whether they were using more or less energy than their neighbors. This was accompanied by (as the economists put it) "normative and injunctive messages designed to motivate action".

What the economists could not bear to say was that these messages, which resulted in 2% reductions in energy use were smiley and frowney faces! Yup. as reported in the NY Times, Christian Science Monitor and ABC News, people turned down their thermostat to turn that frown upside down. People who were not motivated by cash incentives.

I guess these economists just could bring themselves to use the words "frowney face" or "smiley face" in a professional paper.

If for any reason you want to read the professional paper, the pdf is at: [link]

For comparison, the CSM article just because I happen to have the link [link] .

I've encountered a few people that expressed scepticism that my sister and I were, well, sisters. Again, just rude.

I don't think we look particularly alike¹, but if you hang out with us for five minutes I think it's pretty damned obvious we were raised together.

¹: Though you'd be hard pressed to describe us distinctly.

Some people have said that my sister and I look nothing alike, and other people have said that we look exactly the same except for our coloring.

Though you'd be hard pressed to describe us distinctly.

But that's a whole nother thing -- people used to love to ask if a college friend and I were sisters, which was ridiculous for various reasons, but we really don't look anything alike. BUT you would have described us in the same way.

I posted a pic of my BFF and I for the silly "siblings week" on Facebook. We have been mistaken for sisters a lot. Also, when I work with her brother (he is a director) people who know he has a sister assume I am the sister. Possibly because in addition to looking alike, we grump at each other a lot.

In college, my BFF, myself and another girl got mistaken for sisters a lot. Not only are we all exactly the same age, the other girl is Jamaican/Italian and we are German /Italian. This may have been because we seemed to be the only three people at my college with brown hair.

Vortex, that's an imaginary pizza! Party isn't until next weekend. And um, sure.

I've been mistaken for a lot of things. Mostly by natives in eastern europe for one of them. Quelle surprise, I'm of swedish, german and anglo-irish descent and there's a lot that moved about prior to that. I've got pretty generic northwestern/central european features. But the utter weirdest was someone who insisted I must have a recent eastern native american ancestor. I think that person might've been delusional, because no one I know, including me, can extrapolate that from my features. Individual was very insistent and I don't get it. And to be really honest, the possible wayback lines through which that were possible? Way too racist to claim a child legitimate of such.

When I was in high school, people often thought my sister and I were twins. We are six years apart. I still can hear her answer to someone who asked how many months apart we were, without hesitation: "72".

In France, most common guesses as to my nationality were Italian and Swedish. That's right, Swedish.

In short, people are stupid.