Want to ask "stupid questions" for fun?

[Marswipp]

Questions such as:

• Why is potato skin brown?
• Why were today's USB ports originally called Universal Serial Bus ports if they were not universal in the first place?
• Why are pineapples tart?
• Why are programming flaws called bugs?

Alas, the list is endless!

[darkstorme]

Not to encourage lunacy, but:

• Depends on the potato, really. Really, the skin of "brown" potatoes is nearer transparent - but as with parchment or vellum, the slight discolourations tend towards brown.. or red.. or blue.
• Because Bill Gates was an optimist.
• Citric Acid.  As to "why citric acid", as with most things, it's an evolutionary arms race.  Fruit flies will take all sorts of fruit, but a great number of them (including the Mediterranean and Caribbean Fruit Flies) prefer the thick-skinned citrus fruits to lay their eggs.  The tree is alright with this... provided they lay their eggs in the fruit after it's ripe, so the seeds and the tree itself aren't damaged, and therefore unable to pass on their genes.  So we get increasing concentration of citric acid (lethal to fruit fly larva) in juvenile fruits, decreasing (the fruit gets sweeter) as it ripens.  It just so happens that the "balanced" stage calls for a fair amount of acid to remain when the fruit is "ripe".... because that provides the best mix of protection and vulnerability.
• There are a few theories for this one, but the leading proponent involves the Harvard Mark II, developed by Howard Aiken.  This computer was not fully digital; it used a series of electronic relays for computation - big switches that could physically change their position in response to other electronic signals.  A researcher likened being in the room with the Mark II and its predecessor when they were running as being near someone firing off a machine gun.  Because these relays were actually quite large, there was a considerable amount of space between the contact points.  According to record, on September 9th, 1947, Grace Hopper was looking for the reason that the latest program hadn't run as expected, and found a moth pinned between the contacts on relay #70.  This was a "bug in the program", and by removing it, she "debugged" the computer.  The term stuck.  Presto!
  

And so, there are answers to everything, if you look hard enough. :)

[MJZ]

*laughs at the USB question* More of Microsoft's brilliance?

 Why are programming flaws called bugs? - because they are insanely irritating and hard to locate and eradicate?

While I'm thinking of MS...

- Why is the new computer operating system of one of the wealthiest companies on the globe completely inept and swarming with errors and issues? (Answers self: Because they have a monopoly, because it's cheaper for them to let real users preform the testing than to hire an actual beta-testing team, because they have a palace upon a mountain built of human souls - much like Blizzard )

- Why don't we actually feed chickens corn but instead do it here on Layo?

- Why is licorice so vile?

- (follow-up question) How can it be both sweet and salty at once?

- Why is the card game in Layo so addictive?

- Why does Kindo's secondary computer run NWN slower than my laptop, if it has similarly performing hardware with more RAM and a very fancy graphics card?

[LightlyFrosted]

Not to PERPETUATE lunacy, but...

- You answered yourself..
- I, for one, own no chickens.  I suppose I could go seeking some chickens to feed corn, but really I'd grow disappointed if, by the time I fed the chicken three bags of corn meal, they failed to produce an egg.  On a much more immediate level, chickens are smelly.
- Liquorice (at least in the continental Europe), is principally flavoured by aniseed, and contains little of the actual liquorice root.  While the liquorice root has a similar flavour, it is much sweeter, and is an active flavouring ingredient in confections such as root beer, and in some herbal teas, where it provides a sweet flavour.  Aniseed, while similar in flavour to the liquorice root, disagrees with many people, and may be the source of your complaint, as it is not as naturally sweet.
On the other hand, many people simply dislike the taste of liquorice in general.  There's no real scientific reasoning behind this, although apparently it can be an acquired taste, through repeated exposure.  It's just a matter of preference, really.
- The salty flavour is more popular in continental Europe, but both liquorice and to a lesser degree, aniseed, are naturally sweet - liquorice extract is sweetened by naturally occuring glycyrrhizin, a sweetener 50 times more sweet than sucrose.
- Probably the same thing that makes CCG's popular in the real world - the dream of putting together the perfect combination of cards to win and win, and win, and.. well, you get the idea.  Alternately, the nice feature of removing combat as a necessity for gaining gold, particularly if your character isn't as combat oriented.  Finally, it's a nice way to compete with your friends, and thusly something for your character to take pride in - be it their deck, or personal skill.
- *Shrugs*

[Desicardo]

I raise a few chickens and do feed corn though not whole kernal.. it is rough ground and called scratch grains.

Can't speak to the vileness of licorice but I know that sweet and salty tastebuds are located in different places on the tongue so both can be tasted independantly or in combination.  Can't remember exactly how many different types of buds there are on the tongue but as I remember from my biology class, sweetness is tasted mostly at the back of the tongue while saltiness is close to the front.

As to the speed of NWN, gotta remember that computers are limited to the speed of it's slowest component so even with a super vid card and bundles of fast ram, if your hard drive or bus transfer is slower than the laptop, the laptop will still outperform.

[darkstorme]

Can't remember exactly how many different types of buds there are on the tongue

Four.  Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter.

As to the speed of NWN, gotta remember that computers are limited to the speed of it's slowest component so even with a super vid card and bundles of fast ram, if your hard drive or bus transfer is slower than the laptop, the laptop will still outperform.

Not strictly true; it depends on where the performance hit takes place.  If it's on  area loads/transitions, then yes, hard drive speeds could be to blame.  Unless it's an older motherboard, I can't see the bus being the limiting factor, but if you've insufficient RAM to run everything the computer's running at once, the page file will be churning, and then we're reduced again to the hard-drive issue.  

In-game, though, any given area and its interactions are run from RAM, not from the disk, so the performance should be identical.. unless the desktop has more hidden background processes running, either simply eating up processor cycles or (as above), swelling the page file.

[Desicardo]

Along the lines of the chicken questions though, one I have often wondered:

Who was the brave soul that first saw an egg pop out of a chicken's bottom and thought to himself 'hmmm that might be good to eat' and had the courage to taste it?  Secondary.. how many other things was he dumb enough to eat before he found something that would kill him?

[LightlyFrosted]

If I had to guess, I'd wager that the brave soul might have observed one of the egg-eating species of carnivore, such as the weasel.  Kind of like Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes' question about cow milk - while it seems outlandish thinking of it from an objective angle, probably contextually there was evidence to support the notion that such things would be both edible and sustaining.

That said, if you go around doing everything that you see animals around you doing, you'll probably fall off a cliff or something.  I'd say 'two' to the second question, but again, that's just an estimate.

[gilshem ironstone]

Necessity being the mother of invention, perhaps some very hungry soul did what he had to with an egg and liked it.  Returned to the masses and proclaimed the wonders of quiche.

[Marswipp]

RAM is accessed all the time when programs are being used, so why is it called Random Access Memory instead of Perpetually Accessed Memory (PAM)?

[darkstorme]

Because "Random Access" doesn't refer to when the memory chips are being accessed, but WHERE.  Discs are largely "sequential access" - that is, you're reading a whole block of information from disk, one byte after another (as an example, a sound file, a movie, a wordprocessing document - all are written to disk as contiguous collections of bytes.  If you skip from place to place on a disk, disk latency on spin-up will quickly slow whatever you're doing to a crawl.

In contrast, RAM allows access (to anything addressable) in O(1) (constant) time.  You can hop wherever you want and suffer no latency-related lag, hence "Random Access".

[Marswipp]

Why did I post this question?:\

[lunchboxkilla]

Why do people think Celgar is insane?

[LightlyFrosted]

In order:

Because you were bored, and wished to try for a meta-question that questioned its own existence.

And because he is.  Like a march hare.

My own koan.. er.. question:
Disregarding good, evil, and the potential for reincarnation, what did you look like before your parents were born?

[Marswipp]

:\\Why are we not thinking for ourselves?

[13BlackRaven]

Why is the colour blue not defined as purple?
Why do bad things happen to bad people?
Why does the word why contain the question why?
Why is How not started with a W? (the 6 w's)

[vitor]

Who let the dogs out?

[crazedgoblin]

why does the word for one sylable have 5 sylables?

(Monosylable)

[crazedgoblin]

why does "Start" on a computer lead to it shutting down?

[Mooneyes]

Why does nothing good happen after midnight?

Ever been told that?