| Jun. 3rd, 2008 @ 09:35 pm Responses to rhetorical questions |
|---|
Q. Why don't they make the whole plane out of the stuff they make the black box out of?
A. It would be too heavy to fly.
Q. Why do they have brail on drive-up ATMs?
A. So passengers can use them For very far-sighted drivers Because ATMs are mass-produced, and the machinery to customise them is more expensive than the saving of not using
Q. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer is fighting a vampire, why does she karate it a lot first, before sticking a stake in its heart? Why doesn't she do that first?
A. Humans are equally vulnerable as vampires to being stuck with stakes. Imagine a knife-fight. Is a good strategy to stab someone immediately? Well, yes, if possible, but they may be able to block. Buffy can have a stake to hand, implicitly presenting a threat, but have to wait for an actual opening before she can use it.
Q. When Giles the Vampire Watcher is researching a demon, why does he leaf through pages and pages of books? Isn't there an index?
A. There is, but it's indexed by name, and if you've just seen a demon, Giles may only have a partial memory of what book it's in, and Xander none at all. It's actually the same with many real-world academics. If you want to look up something, and already know what it's called (eg. "integration by blah"), you can find lots of information, but if you only have a hint about what is relevant (eg. "I want to integrate [this]"), you have to experiment to find out what technique is useful. If you're an expert, and have a good description of the problem, you're likely to find it at once, but otherwise, you may have to put some work into defining the problem first.
Q. Well, why don't they scan them into a computer and index them by physical characteristics?
A. It makes sense. They tried that in season #1, and accidentally released Moloch onto the internet. I think this put them off.
Q. Well, why don't they type them in?
A. They did get round to that eventually, but it was never 100% reliable, on account of being typed by different people.
Q. A fishmonger has a sign saying "FRESH FISH SOLD HERE TODAY". Why is "sold" necessary? Isn't that implicit[1]?
Q. Why is "here" necessary? Isn't that implicit?
Q. Why is "today" necessary? Isn't that implicit?
Q. Why is "fish" necessary? Isn't that implicit?
Q. Why is "fresh" necessary? Isn't that implicit?
A1. Yes, some shops do sell non-fresh fish. Either fish that's been caught a day ago, or frozen, or whatever's slightly worse than whatever this one sells.
A2. It's advertising. We know the fish is fresh, but saying so reminds us, and associates the idea with this shop.
A3. Once you said "fresh", removing the sign carries a worse implication never having it there in the first place didn't.
A4. Yes, in fact, all the words are redundant ("fish" is actually most redundant, assuming fish are displayed, "fresh" least), but putting up an empty sign, or a sign saying "mu", needs a footnote to explain the whole reasoning process, since English often has some redundant words in a sentence, but doesn't make sense if you remove all of them, but fish-mongers often have an intuitive understanding of how English works, without having studied it in detail.
OTOH, perhaps a sign saying "mu" would be a big attraction! I'd go there (if I wanted fresh fish) :)
A semi-serious question would be the first two and last five questions are traditionally part of a joke. But is there any more specific reason why they're funny? It's funny because making a plane out of black-box is superficially reasonable, when the only thing you know about black-box is that it's relatively impervious to plane crashes, but it's not actually reasonable for the reasons stated. But if it were obviously a good idea, or obviously a bad idea, it wouldn't be funny.
[1] This comes from an old joke, where one or successive passers-by note the successive redundancies, and the fishmonger removes the words one at a time, ending with the word "fish", which the passer-by then says is compeltely redundant. |
|  |
