2ACV15 nano-DYNs

Greetings, fellow beetle-browed denizens of the internet.

I saw 'The Problem with Popplers' last night in MPEG form, and it was great - probably one of the funniest yet. And I must admit I hadn't a clue about the true nature of the Popplers before it was revealed - it was a genuine surprise. And a pretty cool one at that. The Omicronian discovering the hallucinogenic properties of hippy flesh had me in stitches...

It was nice to see lots of old characters again - I'm interested to see how they'll develop. I have a feeling that the Omicronians will threaten the very existence of humanity many more times. And I'm looking forwards to it. :-)

Now on to the nerdy side of things:

• 'Toronga' appears to be the name of a zoo in Australia. According to Google, anyway. I bet Leela will get enough orangutan jibes already.

• Do people realise what mountain oysters are? Eww...

• The laptop computer operated by Hermes looks a lot like an Apple iBook. The Futurama staff showing their usual preference towards these computing dinosaurs? ;-)

• Sight of Bender painting a spacecraft reminiscent of the intro to Red Dwarf. Sort of.

• Intelligent dolphins? They are, after all, the second most intelligent creatures on Earth (humans are third). It didn't look like a very large dolphin, anyway. That makes it even worse - the dolphin equivalent of veal?

• The juvenile Omicronian, Jurr (sp?) appears to be male, or at least the Omicronian equivalent. He has three horns on his head, like Lurr (sp?). What appears to be a female Omicronian doesn't have any horns on her head.

And now to affirm my true nerdiness - to calculate the approximate number of trips required by the Planet Express delivery ship to deliver 198 billion Popplers. Anyway, enough chit-chat. Restrain the specimen!

Approximate (very, very approximate) usable volume of ship = 25 x 25 x 50ft = 175m^3 (Yes, I do stuff in SI)

Approximate volume of a Poppler = 1in^3 = 0.000016m^3

Number of Popplers in one fully laden delivery ship = 10 900 000 (Quite a few, really)

Number of trips required = A suffusion of yellow.

Hang on - that's not right. Try another calculator... = 17600 trips

I can see why they hired that U-Yank trailer... :-)

Adam Foster

Where do you get that information come from? Everything I can remember hearing indicates the intelligence of dolphins and chimpanzees is the closest to ours, without going over. This chart for example bears this out:

http://www.polaris.net/~rblacks/dolphins.htm

Average Brain Ratios
Species   Brain Weight   Body Weight   Ratios
Human      3.1  lbs       150 lbs       2.1 %
Dolphin    3.5  lbs       300 lbs       1.19%
Chimp       .75 lbs       110 lbs        .70%

"What I'm trying to communicate is that I'm willing to do nudity, no extra charge!" -Bill McNeal, Newsradio, 1998

-Eric S. ([email])

Everyone knows mice are the most intelligent species on Earth.

Phreke

In article ,

intelligent

remember

this

I suspect Adam is referring to The Guide: http://www.h2g2.com/A36758

----the comments stop here, what's below is a freeloading ad----

Eric S. wrote in message news:8fait6$[email]...

you bloody fool now adam foster, there's a froopy guy who knows where his towel is... eric, get yourself a copy of the "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy", then you'll understand why humans are only the 3rd most intellegent species on planet earth, being topped by both dolphins and white mice. - Krinkle

They couldn't have been making all those trips themselves, since they were allied with Fishy Joe.

On 10 May 2000 01:58:25 EDT, Ben Mann wrote:

They not only stuffed the ship, they stuffed Bender full too.

Since it was 2 days from earth, that's 4 days round trip. 70400 days (193 years). Unless the ship has some kind of 4th dimensional thing that makes the inside bigger than the out side . . .

They would give away the secret, or Fishy Joe would just go them free.

Here's another real trivial bit: The sign Leela crashes into says: Over 3.8 X 10 ^10 poplers served.

3.8 X 10^10 is the speed of light in meters per second.

--Larry

Ummm...no. 2.9979 X 10^8...or 3.0 X 10^8 meters per second is the speed of light in vacuum.

I don't know what the significance of 38 billion is.

On Wed, 10 May 2000 21:54:59 GMT, "Josh Lipton-Duffin" wrote:

Ooops! You're right. Urrr I mean ahem . . . I meant to say that it's in centimeter's per second, yeah that's it . . . No wait, that would still be wrong.

I should have checked first, but the number looked familiar.

Oh well. At least you caught it before someone used my post a the basis for a time machine.

--Larry

Which they could spend fifteen years working on, without any results.

If only it had worked, you could go back and not waste your time...

Math is hard.

of

That's "_physics_ is hard." :-)

Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

In article , "Josh Lipton-Duffin" wrote:

It's a Simpsons ref.

It's all the same, really...

Ben -- [email] -- http://www.netins.net/showcase/benssite/

<Shocked look>

You must be doing something wrong... :-D

Josh Lipton-Duffin wrote:

No Physics is Phun!!

Ummm...no. 2.9979 X 10^8...or 3.0 X 10^8 meters per second is the speed of light in vacuum.

I don't know what the significance of 38 billion is.<<

It was the number of Popplers eaten at that point. Why must it be something more? They were just making a joke about scientific notation. ***** Ceci n'est pas un sig

I know I'm posting a followup to the wrong message, but the news server at university has a terrible feed (of the five replies to my original post, it received one) and hence I have to read stuff with remarq.com. To make things worse, they firewall out all public news servers, so the only one my computer can connect to is the university one. Anyway...

Larry F wrote:

Could this be why so many Popplers were sold without the Planet Express crew appearing to profit significantly from them? Perhaps Fishy Joe made another offer which would benefit him more than the crew...

Um... According to my Big Sheet O' Physical Constants, the speed of light is a mere 299 792 458 ms^-1 - quite a bit less. Unless they really did increase the speed of light in 2208, which would complicate matters somewhat.

Looking at the list of constants, I can't see any close to 3.8 * 10^10 - although it may just be that I haven't yet covered the relevant sections of physics. :-)

Adam Foster

"Adam Foster" wrote in message news:[email]...

The approximate speed of light is 3.0 * 10^8 m/s. That's probably how he confused it with 3.8 * 10^10.

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"Knowledge brings fear." �Mars University, Futurama

Here's another obscure reference that I haven't seen mentioned:

Bender calls Zoidberg "Sigmund". Unless it turns out that his first name really is Sigmund, I think that's a reference to "Sigmund and the Sea Monster".

It was a short lived kids show about a friendly sea monster named Sigmund who befriends a couple of kids. The kids have to protect him from both grown-ups and the rest of the sea monsters who are very unfriendly.

For more info: http://www.livingisland.com/shows/sigmund/desc.html

--Larry

"Larry F" wrote in message news:[email]...

I believe Sigmund refers to Sigmund Freud, but I don't remember the context of Bender's conversation with Zoidberg.

--------

"Knowledge brings fear." -Mars University, Futurama

On Wed, 17 May 2000 02:43:47 -0400, "Fen Phen" wrote:

Bender says "Slow down there Sigmund" when Zoidberg is scarfing down free Popplers. On Sigmund and the Sea Monster, the kids had to keep sneaking food out of the house to feed him.

This is a pretty obscure reference, since most of the episodes were destroyed in a fire, and the show wasn't very popular when it did run. However, since it was about a sea monster with a big appetite, it does seem to fit.

Perhaps, his name was Sigmund Zoid and he changed his name to sound more like a doctor. It would also be fitting this episode, since they mentioned Fry and Leela's first names for the first time. (Fry's was seen on a screen in the pilot, but never spoken).

Hmmmm.

--Larry