Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex
because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs
and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little
eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around
and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the
female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just
dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven
by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the
truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of
them that it doesn't make any difference.
-- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
Teen Should Know"
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"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams)
"365,365,365,365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365. He [ten-year-old
Truman Henry Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his
pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes
in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be
in an agony, until, in not more than one minute, said he,
133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!" An electronic
computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be as much
fun to watch.
-- James R. Newman (The World of Mathematics)
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