All Too Flat : Serious : Ask The Fish

In an attempt to increase the frequency of updates to the site, we are adding yet another freaking blog. I don't know why we think this will increase the frequency of updates to site - we have at least three of the things anyway, and they are updated just about as often as Boston wins the World Series. But we try. Ask The Fish will now be done blog style, with new entries getting posted as soon as they are answered. Expect the same quality of advice that you have come to expect (from what is either a 800 lb halibut with a highly defined sense of irony, or one of four uber-geeks with nothing better to do on a Saturday night).

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Dear Ask the Fish,
According to Snapple "Real Fact" #56, 1/4 of the bones in your body are in your feet. Why are there so many bones in a human foot?
-Snapple Cap

Dear Snapple,
First of all, let me just say that because it was in a Snapple cap guarantees that it is false. Really, I haven't seen a true statement under one of those caps. Read our myths for goodness sake.
Given that rant, this fact might be true. But it ceratainly isn't interesting. You have 10 toes, and each of them has like 2 bones a piece. That's 20 bones right there! There aren't that many other bones in the rest of your body. Figure your hands have another 1/4, your ribs and spine are another 1/4, and then all the rest.
And your feet are really important. They take you where ever you want to go. I think feet will continue to be important in the future, that is to say, until the Segway Human Transporter is classified as a non-motor vehicle in the remiaining 18 states)
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
i keep getting adverts for ink jet cartridges. they seem like good deals. i dismiss them on the grounds that they are spam. but they might be good. check it out for me. are these ink jet dealies good?
-printing in prussia

Dear printing,
Actually they are good deals! We at ask the fish get a fair amount of spam (boy, that's an understatement!) and we take each one seriously. In fact, we have managed to generate a passive income of $12,000 per month by sitting at home eating Herbalife. I think you should purchase whatever anyone tries to sell you by way of unsoliticited e-mail!
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Why is everyone going on about the phrase "Planet Earth Is Blue and theres nothing i can do" ? isnt that a bit of a pathetic statement? what did he Intent to do? why cant he carry out his actions because of the colour of the earth? did he intend to do something about the colour of the earth?
-Confused

Dear Confused,
I think the problem comes in your lack of punctuation. Try it this way:
"Planet Earth is blue; there's nothing I can do."
That sentence really has two independent clauses stuck together with an "and." Good ol' David Bowie is singing about an astronaut lost in space after leaving the spaceship in a capsule. As he's floating away, he's watching the blue earth and realizing there is nothing for him to do to save himself. I mean, when you're floating out into the void, what else are you going to do? Look into the darkness in front of you? Way better to look at the Earth.
And speaking of punctuation, I love punctuation. I think it's really funny to do things like:
Statement (parenthetical remark posed as question?)?
What kind of language allows a punctuation structure like "?)?"?
heh heh.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Is hollywood actor Charles Bronson alive? Is he got any heir?
-Nanda

Dear Nanda,
According to the reputable www.dead-or-alive.org, Charles Bronson is indeed alive and kicking (No pun indended).
Oh, and based on this photo from 2000, he's got a full head of heir.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
How long would one mol (g?) of steel wire, at 20g per cm^3, and diameter of 5cm be?
-Eating my Eata

Dear Eating,
We here at the Fish love questions about mols of things. Mostly because a mol is such a big number, and as we've discussed in the past, the more of something there is the funnier it is.

We can describe the mass of an arbitrary length (L) of said wire as:
m = pi*(Diameter of wire)*L*20

We know there are N_A grams in the length of wire, so we set m=6.02*10²³, and solve for L. This yields:

L = 1.916*10²¹[cm]
= 1.916*10¹⁹[m]
= 1.916*10¹⁷[km]

That's enough wire to string along the length of the Empire State Building 5.028*10¹⁶ times. Or around the diameter of the Earth 1.5*10¹³ times. Or to string between Earth and Pluto 25.43 million times (when Pluto is at its farthest distance from our planet).
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
I found a stupid thing on the web about a giant couter. Do you think that people will seriously subscribe to that thing? http://www.compteur-geant.ca.tc
-Boo

Dear Boo,
I'm not sure whether it's the psuedo-anonimity provided by data connections, or the fact that the net has grown to be one of the more casual forms of communication, but spelling errors and poor grammer have really become par for the course these days. Now, I don't bring it up to poke fun, but to make an important point. When I first read your email, I thought you were trying to tell me about a giant cooter that you had seen online, and to be honest, I wasn't that interested since I know there isn't very much piscean porn online. So I allowed this question to fall by the wayside for a couple of weeks.

Of course, now that I know that what you're talking about is a giant counter, I'm still as uninterested. So maybe I'm wrong about the "spelling always being unimportant" thing. In fact, do me a favor and scale your spelling errors in inverse proportion to the level of interest in your topic. That way I know what I'll be getting into when I start reading these things.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
what is a swampyankee? seriously!
-nipnet

Dear nipnet,
A full description of the meaning of the term "Swamp Yankee" evidentally takes up a number of full screens of text (as evidenced by this excerpt from David Phillips' Lengendary Connecticut. So if you really want the full run-down, go there. But I read it all, and it's really boring. So here's the quick version:

It's a New England thing. Actually, it's not even a New England thing, it's more of a Connecticut thing. Which really aggravates me, because I definitely don't have time to be learning questionable slang from relatively inconsequential portions of America (and if you object to me classifying CT as inconsequential, let's start with the fact that it's "The Nutmeg State", and close with the fact that it's most popular tourist attraction is the Long Island Sound: a body of water named after New York. Riding on the coattails of greatness, they are). As if that's not bad enough, no one really seems to have a clear understanding of what the term means. Swamp Yankee is "applied with mixed tones of disapproval and grudging respect" to a particular type of Connecticitian (Connecticutter?). That type being, evidentally, an individual whom you respect, and yet still disapprove. Which makes the person using the term someone who can accept the contradiction inherent in disapproving of something that they respect.

The conclusion I can make from this is that Swamp Yankee is less of a term used to describe the person being called a Swamp Yankee, and more of a term used to help others figure out that the person using the term is a dipshit.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
i challenge ye to find the 24 numbers that ye equasion accepts to produce whole numbers...
6n+12 %(divide) n-8
ye can use thee algerbraic rules if ye dare ;)
n-8|6n+12
n-8|6(n-8)
n-8|6n-48
n-8|(6n-48)-(6n+12)
...
-aNDY

Dear aNDY,
Ahem:

n=1;
k = 1;
list=zeros(1,24);

while (n <25)

if ( ((6*k+12)/(k-8)) == ( floor((6*k+12)/(k-8))) )
k
list(n) = k;
n=n+1;
end
l=-k;

if ( ((6*l+12)/(l-8)) == ( floor((6*l+12)/(l-8))) )
list(n) = l;
n=n+1;
end
k=k+1;
end

Resulting in a final list of: 2 -2 3 4 -4 5 6 7 -7 8 9 10 11 12 -12 13 14 18 20 -22 23 28 38 -52

Trivial. No algebraic substitutions necessary.

Slam!
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
My favorite non-food food is Spam. (http://www.spam.com/) What's yours?
-SPAM spaM spAM SPAM in Pennsylvania

Dear SPAM,
Circus peanuts.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
I'm always having problems with my cell service, constantly getting phone calls dropped in the middle of conversations. That I'm used to, but the real problem comes when I try to call back the person I was talking to: invariably they are calling me back at the same time, and we end up talking to each others voicemails! What can I do?
-Cellular in Seattle

Dear Cellular,
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM ASK THE FISH
We hereby propose a standard for the whole dropped calls-who-calls-back problem.
It goes like this
1. If both parties are on a cell phone, the person whose name is lexicographically greater, always calls back. Note: that means the person whose name comes first in the alphabet, starting with their first name.
2. If one party is on a land-line phone, the person with the cellular service (and hence no long-distance fees) calls back regardless of names.
Huge?
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Why when it's windy does it sometimes blow ALL the clouds away and you have a beautiful blue sky, but it's cold as hell, and on other days it's really windy and there's TONS of clouds but it's warm. I guess I understand the warm cold thing, (I took Geography 101) but they never taught me why the wind only sometimes blows the clouds away.
-pwbk

Dear pwbk,
This page has some lovely pictures and definitions of cloud types. The quick answer to your question about why the wind doesn't blow some of the clouds away is that it depends on their altitude. Cumulonimbus (thunderhead) clouds can be as high as 50,000' off the ground. I think Bunny Lebowski said it best: "I can't blow that far."
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Does it count as drinking alone if I'm Asking the Fish or talking on the phone?
-Shiraz

Dear Shiraz,
Boozing while talking on the phone? Yeah, that counts as drinking alone. Sorry. Calling a 976 number still makes you sitting on the couch by yourself, right? Same thing here. As for writing Ask the Fish and drinking at the same time? ummm... errr... I gotta plead the Fifth on this one.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Hi Fish! I just got this great All Too Flat metro bag It's amazing! Anyway, I'm having some trouble deciding how to wear the bag. Should it be just above my butt or in the small of my back? Is there a regulation on the strap length when wearing ATF bags? Thanks for your help!
-Gary in Granada

Dear Gary,
Hmmm. I could be wrong, but isn't the small of your back == just above your butt? I don't know things like that. Length of the strap? Geez man! What are you talking about? Does this messenger bag make me look fat? What? How should you wear your accessories?
Look, just buy more ATF gear. If you are wearing an ATF floppy hat, KennyBoxers, drinking out of a scientist mug while playing with an All Too Flat Frisbee, I think that the location of your bag will be the least of your concerns. Oh, and when you get all that stuff on, take a picture!
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Help me out here: One hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fat fickle females sitting sipping scotch, six sinbad sailors sailing the seas of cheese, seven ? Eight octegenarian (something) ? Nine nubile nudist nublings nibbling ? and who could forget ten? So what are 7,8 and 9 again?
-Turtles don't remember as well as elephants

Dear Turtles,
"Five fat fickle females?" I disagree. If you ask me, it would go a little more like this:
One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, four limerick oysters, five corpulent porpoises, six pairs of Don Alverso's tweezers, Seven thousand Macedonians in full dress battle array, Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt, Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth, ten conical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who haul, stall around the cores of the quo, of the quay, of the quivy all at the same time!
And since you did ask me, well then, I guess that's how it goes! Booya!
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
Dear fish dude, I had a dream where i was looking through my wallet, and found a 47 dollar bill amongts all the other money. A 47 dollar bill??? wtf does this mean?
-ShadowWolf

Dear ShadowWolf,
Let me tell you a little story. Remember the rant a few weeks ago about my couch-not-fitting-through-the-door-of-my-apartment fiasco? (of course you do, but for the rest of you who aren't Sean Collins you can refresh yourself in the rant archive).
Anyway, one of the more interesting parts of this story is that while we were carrying this HEAVY couch 6 city blocks to our apartment, 2 cool kids who hang around the Cube at Astor Place offered up their skateboards so we could roll it the last 3 blocks. It was so nice of them that I decided that the next time I see someone carrying something heavy in the City, I'm definitely going to help them out.
Well, the other night I was walking home and saw someone carrying a HEAVY computer monitor, so I offered to help. She said "actually, if you can just hail a cab for me, that would be great." No problem. I hailed down the next cab I saw, opened the door for her, and walked off. Simple. Easy. Good deed for the day.
But as I'm walking away, the cab pulls up really slowly behind me and the window rolls down. "Thank you" in a raspy voice. The girl was was actually a Dude! "Here's my phone number" he said. "ummmm.. thanks," I replied. "I'll see you soon," and gave me a big smile.
The point of the story is this- that guy is a just like your 47 dollar bill: a little queer.
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Dear Ask the Fish,
I know what happens if you over-feed a fish. But my question is: What happens when you ask a fish too many questions?
-Larry H.

Dear Larry,
Now THAT is a good question. The answer is that he gets backlogged with over 80 some odd questions and then his friends bitch bitch bitch that we haven't gotten to theirs yet!
-ATF

19 Oct 2002

Got a question? Need advice? Ask the Fish!