Wait, what? A drinking straw has one hole. Everyone already knew that, right?

A while back I wrote a post about the not-so-brainteasing topic of hot dogs being referred to as sandwiches. It's silly, but the part about it that is silly to me isn't necessarily the same aspect that most people would find silly. It seems like commonly, when this topic is discussed, both sides attempt to exercise discursive techniques familiar from formal debates. They attempt to establish definitions of terms that they think will favor their own side. They refer to patterns and attempt to arrange various premises and contentions in such a way as to build a case that their side wins. It's the sort of stuff that I'd find interesting in another context, but it seems that the parties involved all forgot that they stumbled into an area where the terms exist within the context of a professional field of study, and that there is a definitive right answer. A definitive right answer, especially one that is readily available and rather clear-cut, tends to stand rather triumphantly against any kind of debate tricks, no matter how clever or sophisticated those tricks might be. So to recapitulate, hot dogs are not sandwiches because the terms "hot dog" and "sandwich" in the context of foods are terms coined by chefs, terms which exist in the context of culinary traditions. It's a rather mundane Q.E.D. to respond to some rather elaborate verbal hedging by both sides of the aisle. But then, that's how these things often work out.

To my surprise, I recently found another not-so-brainteasing question come up alongside the hotdog/sandwich topic: "How many holes does a drinking straw have?" My initial response as soon as I read that one was something like, "I think it's one, right? I mean, topology isn't really in my wheelhouse, but this is an exceedingly basic question and unless there's some trick, I know it's going to be one." And then I had the followup thought of, "Someone has probably already asked a topologist this question, so let's look it up on the internet." I was, in both instances, correct on all counts. It's an easy problem for topology, people have already asked topologists, and the answer is, indeed, one. Well, that was easy.

What's strange and frustrating to me about this, though, is that I guess I expected better. The hotdog thing seems more like a forgivable sort of mistake. The sort of people who like to argue about these things are nerds. A lot of them are into or familiar with physics, biology, epistemology, information science, etc. And perhaps the sort of nerds who are culinary nerds are also not the sort to get dragged into such arcane debates. So it becomes a topic with all sorts of irrelevant philosophical debate, because there just aren't enough people with both an interest in getting involved and the sense to remind the participants that there's already a system of nomenclature established for these things. At least, I thought that was what was going on, at the time I wrote the hotdog post. The nerds who nerd it up with elaborate discussions on abstract debate topics like "Does X count as Y" just might not have much overlap with people who are interested in culinary history. So they miss the point and look a bit silly to me, but it's the kind of mistake I guess I expected. But how many holes an object has? Surely many of these same sorts of nerds are also math nerds! Surely even the ones who don't know much topology know enough to know that it exists and know enough to look to topology for an answer. Right? Right? Apparently not.

And on that, I'm stumped. Here we have the sort of question that...

1. Seems obviously to be a topology question.
2. Has an easy, readily available answer in topology.
3. Has a definitive answer from the field of topology that also would seem to happen to match the most intuitive answer (from my perspective, anyway), so there shouldn't be much objection.

And yet some people are still arguing for a wrong conclusion? How? What's wrong with these people?