Dear Ask the Fish,
Why do golf courses have 18 holes, instead of a more round number like 20?
-Meg Dewar
Dear Meg,
Why is 20 more round? 8 is a lot rounder than 0. In fact, an 8 looks like a golf ball resting on the cusp of a hole, and the 1 looks like a flag (well, not in the sans serif font we use on ATF, but in Times New Roman it does!). I think it's pretty clever.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Why do I sometimes wake up with crust in my eyes and I haven't been eating anything in bed? Well, nothing with crust, anyway....
-REB.babe
Dear REB.babe,
ANSWER
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
please enlighten me about the origin of the phrase, "never up, never in."
-curious karen
Dear curious,
ANSWER
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
If the Earth was 100% water and the moon was Jell-O mix, and the moon crashed into the earth, would the temperature in space and the relative proportions of the two masses be condusive making Jell-O?
-ben @ bloomberg
Dear ben,
108.321x10^10 km^3, while the volume of the moon is 2.1958x10^10, for a moon:earth ratio of .0204. Jell-o is made with 2 tbsp of Jell-o mix and 2 cups of water (2 cups=96 tbsp) for a jello:water ratio of .0208! Wow! Our ratios are correct! Now what about the directions? For best results, it is important to boil the water before putting it in the fridge. I certainly think the heat generated by the moon crashing into the earth will be more than sufficient. "Let it chill for 4 hours or until firm." Not a problem! It is freezing in space. As long as the collision doesn't knock the Earth out of orbit and send it spiraling towards the sun, God is soon going to be enjoying the largest Jigglers in the Universe!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
why is 'Bombay Duck' a fish and not a bird?
-Dilip C.
Dear Dilip,
Same reason a koala bear is not a bear- because Australia and India are in the southern and easter hemispheres respectively and they have mixed up animal names over there.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
would it be more economical to cook meat etc in the toaster, on high? if your short on money you could have 2 appliances in one! :-)
-Andrew
Dear Andrew,
More economical than what? Your convection oven? No. Your hair dryer? Yes.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Do you think pot should be legalized? What about any other drugs like e or acid?
-The Lennon
Dear The,
Pot should be decriminalized, yes. But not e and acid.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Should poop float or not? My girlfriend asked me that and I was stumped! Please help us.
-Pressing Issues
Dear Pressing,
Floaters are turds that have an unusually high gas content. Sometimes the gases produced by bacteria in our gut don't have a chance to collect into a large fart bubble, but remain dispersed in the feces. The poop then comes out foamy, and has a lower density than water. Poop with a high fat content will also float.
Also, make sure that your poop is really floating... it might just appear to be on the surface of the water, but in fact it filled up the entire bowl and only the tip is showing! Congrats! You've made an iceberg!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
I'm down to my last few dollars to continue my internet addiction... I've been searching and searching to find a real internet job that would pay like a real 9-5 job(at least). Do any jobs like this exist? I want to be a webbie...surf, edit, research, and earn money at the same time with having fun, and not one of those insane get rich quick schemes where aren't selling anything, they are just looking to take money without even selling a t-shirt, or having a sense of humor or giving anything of value! I hope you can help...
-Internet addict looking for work
Dear Internet,
http://answers.google.com. Sign up to answer people's questions and they'll pay you depending on the difficulty/importance. You have to pass a test in order to become an official answerer. If you want a copy of my test answers, you're welcome to have them. I didn't pass though. (note: that explains why I do my own question and answer column and not google's!)
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Is it unhealthy to drink much coffee?
-Thordur Gunnarsson
Dear Thordur,
Well Thordur, it's surprisingly bad for you. The main problem is that there is caffeiene in coffee, and regular intake of caffeine can cause problems. Symptoms of too much caffeine include headache, bodily tremors, nervousness, irritability; these symptoms are not uncommon with regular intake of two to six cups a day. Also associated with high caffeine intake are arrythmias of the heart and sexual impotence. (Courtesy of the Dietitian) Another major drawback is the fact that 5 cups a day can end up being a thirty dollar a day habit if you only drink girlie coffee drinks like I do.
Don't forget that the same problems occur with heavy intake of any caffeinated beverages, so us Diet Coke junkies arent off the hook.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What would happen if you go to space, in a shuttle, and let out a waterball. It'll obviously be a sphere of water, but what would happen if you put a fish in the middle of that sphere of water? Would it live?
-cheech
Dear cheech,
Funny question. It's cold in space. As another one of our myths, we were going to freeze goldfish and bring them back to life. But after the backlash from animal rights people (including yourself, Cheech) we decided against it. And for future reference, the correct term is "bunch of jackasses." Not "Pretty stupid people."
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
My monkey keeps turning the heating off when I go out to work, causing me to have an almost constantly red nose. I know he has his fur to keep him warm an everything, but people are starting to point and laugh at me in the street.
I did shave him once, but the RSPCA threatened to take him away - so that's no longer an option.
Please help me, my workmates have nicknamed me Rudolph, and it's reduced my self confidence to nothing!
-Shivering in Shrewsbury
Dear Shivering,
Wanna kill 2 birds with one stone? Send him our way. We have a job opening for a Helper Monkey and we'd be glad to have him!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Is it acceptable for me to let a silent one go during a business meeting if I am absolutely positive that it is not going to stink?
-Gass Man
Dear Gass,
Short answer 'yes' with an 'if'; long answer 'no' with a 'but'.
Yes, if you're the boss. No, but lets be totally honest here: Sometimes, it's just out of our hands. Actually, the whole acceptability thing is a classic dilemma of the strictest sort (di - meaning two, lemma meaning horns, referring to a situation with two unpleasant options). Generally speaking, the louder the gaseous emission, the less offensive it will be. As you get more and more silent, the more it will offend. So there is a clear trade-off. One might argue that the more silent it is, the less likely your associates will be to find out that it was you. But, while that is true, you are definitely raising the stakes.
Unfortunately, I seemed to have strayed from my original brief. To recap: Any decision to the question in question must be wisely considered, as there is no one response to cover all situations.
Unless you are, in fact, the boss; in which case, let 'er rip.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
I have two network cards in my computer running in tandom via a "Network Bridge" in Windows XP. Does doing this increase my bandwidth or am I just wasting time?
-Spoon
Dear Spoon,
It depends. Yes, if the networks cards are connected to different physical networks (e.g. two cable modems). No, if they are on the same network because if the computer tries to use both network cards at the same time you will get collisions, which will actually lower your bandwidth. The network card is already connected using the maximum bandwidth (10Mbps or 100Mbps or even 1000Mbps), so you can't squeeze anymore out of the network using another card on the same network.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What's the approximate lag time between when someone sends you an email (to your alltooflat.com accounts) and when you receive it? I'm asking because Steve Jobs pulled a Microsoft last week and is going to start charging $50/year ($100 after the first year) for my free, but fast, mac.com email account. I figure I can spend less and get my own domain name. So I set it up - paid $25 for a year of hosting (I don't need much) and 7 email addresses, plus $15 to register the domain name. But now when I try to POP my email off this new account, it takes absolutely forEVER! I did a test: sent an email to my mac.com, work account, and this new account all at the same time. The mac.com email came back in less than a minute (this is great - I need to have "talk"-speed email conversations with my soon-to-be husband sometimes, you know). My work email picked it up after 11 minutes. That's pretty bad, especially since I sent the email from down the hall from the actual server, but get this - it's been half an hour, and my new account still hasn't picked up my email! Even when I check webmail!
This is agony. Traveler's Mail, where ARE you??? Are you guys having any better luck with your host? Should I suck it up and pay Steve Jobs the $50 for fast email?
-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n
Dear n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n,
It's measured in seconds. And not many. Our new web host is fast! If you want an ATF mail account, we can probably work something out (for a small fee of course... this site is expensive!) Just imagine: you could be n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n@alltooflat.com!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
My house is very messy, and I really don't want to clean it. I can't get my roommates to do it because they are just as lazy as I am. How can I get it clean?
-Lazyass
Dear Lazyass,
What am I, the Yahoo Yellow Pages?
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What to do if the man in your life has not called?
-Maz
Dear Maz,
Be thankful he isn't wasting your daytime minutes! Why isn't he e-mailing you?
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
If I had Avagadro's number of halibuts (which is to say, a mol of halibuts) what volume would the halibut's fill? Since they are flat fish, do they stack well? that might reduce the volume, right?
-Avagadro
Dear Avagadro,
Hmmm... you didn't specify what age halibut. A baby halibut may be only 20 inches long and weigh 3.6 pounds. But a fully grown halibut may live to be 40 years old, 100 inches long, and weigh 500 pounds! No fooling! Anyway, lets approximate an average halibut as a parallelpipeds of dimensions 50" x 20" x 6". This gives each fish a volume of 6000 cubic inches or 98x10^3 cm^3, or 9.8x10^2-2 m^3. A mol of these bad boys will fill 5.9x10^20 cubic meters. In other words, this is enough fish to cover the earth 12 miles high! Avagadro's number is SUCH A BIG NUMBER! That's probably why Pamesan the Baptist likes it so much!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Why isn't "What Would Jesus Do?" listed in the FAQ at www.wwjd.com?
-Ben at Bloomberg
Dear Ben,
Probably for the same reasont that "What Would Cheesus Do?" isn't on the FAQ of All Too Flat!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What is the answer?
-Holly
Dear Holly,
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Is Curt Schilling human? 12.7 strike-outs per walk?
-The Baseball Addict
Dear The,
212 K / 23 games = 9.2 k/game. I'm not impressed.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Lat week, this was your answer: "I hate to be a prick, but could you please refrain from ending your questions in prepositions"
You ended your sentence in a preposition. We here at Harvard don't end our sentences in prepositions.
-Maria
Dear Maria,
SAFETY SCHOOL! GO BIG RED!!!
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Why did the full album forum die ?
-Tom
Dear Tom,
Because it was illegal. Duh.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
If sun tans your skin, why does it bleach your hair? I'm confused because we don't see much sun here....
-Dazed and confused in London
Dear Dazed,
When you get a tan, what is actually happening is that the melanocytes are producing melanin pigment in reaction to ultraviolet light in sunlight. Ultraviolet light stimulates melanin production. The pigment has the effect of absorbing the UV radiation in sunlight, so it protects the cells from UV damage.
As for your hair, the molecules responsible for color in the hair are rather fragile. Sunlight breaks them apart and changes their appearance. Photochemically cut into fragments, the colored molecules lose their color.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What is a Casading Style Sheet? Also, what's the big deal with Masons? Finally, do you have a neato ATF screan saver? That would be keen.
-PoonToad
Dear PoonToad,
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. Both Masons (Desmond and Anthony) are good basketball players in the NBA. No screen saver as of yet. Potentially one in the near future though. We'll keep you posted. We do have some nice wallpaper.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Why do bubbles go down in a pint of Guinness?
-navier-stokes
Dear navier-stokes,
Please see the above question about the turning point in human history.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
What would Cheesus do?
-Rev. William T. Relaxo
Dear Rev.,
Buy something from our WWCD store so we can afford to keep this web site up and running! (we're really not kidding on this one. It's getting friggin' expensive! Besides, the ATF merchandise is cool).
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Linux, which one to use? On a Pentium I 100 Mhz or so machine with not much RAM? On a good machine? Linux for Macintosh? or Intel machines only? What about a hand-held Linux OS? Finally, what's up with Tablet computers?
-Pengin Boy
Dear Pengin,
Red Hat 7.3. Red Hat 7.3. Red Hat 7.3. OS X.1. Red Hat 7.3. Great idea. Tablet PCs are a Microsoft thing. Potentially cool. Not as good as Jacob's electronic notebook or Joshy's roll-up screen, but still cool.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
If someone says to you, "Everything I say is a lie." and then says, "I am lying", does that mean that he is telling the truth or that he is lying?
-Paradoxes are confusing
Dear Paradoxes,
You are just trying to confude the Fish. Not going to happen. Here's your problem: based on the logic system that you are assuming, those statements can not be resolved. I can't blame you- you are using the logic system that all humans use. But if you refer to last week's Ask the Fish about what would happen if universal affirmatives could be completely converted, then you probably wouldn't learn anything more. So don't bother.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
Where can I find the song, "I'm swimming backwards for Christmas, Across the Irish Sea"
-Tony P
Dear Tony,
You can't. But you can probably find the song "I'm Walking Backward for Christmas," since that is a song which actually exists. Sung originally on The Goon Show (a BBC radio comedy show from the 50's - early 60's), the song you are looking for is one that was later used as the inspiration for a geek song "I'm typing backwards for Christmas," which is actually much less entertaining.
Lyrics are available here. You can purchase a copy of the Goons "3: I'm walking Backwards for Chrismas" 2CD set from townsend-records, or if you can find out what show it originally aired and you're lucky enough, this guy might have it, for just a buck fifty.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
i have a 84 subaru gl 4wd sedan it has a autoamatic transmission. and it wont shift out of first it has tranny fluid whats wrong.
-justin
Dear justin,
Yesterday, I went to question Mark, my mechanic, about the problem. He said that sometimes a car will go through a period where you need to put more "coal on the fire." This, of course, is old mechanic lingo for give it more gas. I asked Mark why he kept using such an antiquated phrase and he said that it reminds him of his mom. Back when Mark was learning to drive with his dad, he would yell "Come Ma, see my coal on the fire," to try to get his Mom outside to watch him sputter around the neighborhood.
That, and your car, like your sentence, has no brakes.
-ATF
Dear Ask the Fish,
since water is considered the most meditative element, in your meditations you surely have already found the answer to this question: what d`you think, was the turning point in human history that made everything start going down -instead of UP- the drain? forever grateful
-forever grateful
Dear forever,
I am by no means an expert on human history, but I do consider myself fairly well versed in the subject having taking a few classes in school. The turning point of human history was when Adam and Eve to ate the apple. If it wasn't for them everybody would be in the garden of eden right now having a grand ole party.
For more information about this watershed event in human history, visit the Bible According to Cheese.
-ATF
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