h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm afraid I've missed a wonderful bit of culture with that song there. It sounds like smething I need to hear. But it's nice to know that I'm fighting on the side of what is good, or something like that.

Its the stonecutters theam song from "The Simpsons" back in the days when it was still half way decent. Now its just boring. I can't rember the enitre song but 15 seconds on google will probebly get you the entireity of the song in all its mavourlous glory and socail coment from 15 secs of google search.

Found it! You don't get lyrics like that these days. And I think I may well have actually seen that episode as well. It is nice to know that there's a genuine conspiracy against some of these things, that it's not just carelessness or random cruelty against the universe.

And I also found the actual song sound, and what appears to be a French site for programming the song as your cell phone ring. You can have a lot of fun with Google.

Indeed you can, try typing in "Whats the average flight spead of a unlaiden swallow" and you will get some nice stuff. More exiting is using bablefish to do the same thing but getting it to translate it into french and copy and paste the french and translate it back. I think It might amuse.

That does indeed sound amusing. Another good way to waste time is looking up weird items on ebay. Would you believe that they had no yak lips up for auction last time I checked?

No Yak lips! the entire economy is going to collapse! there is no way we can ever recover from this point! From now on we wiill slowly spiral downwards to the shoe event horrision!

Flood the market! Make yak lips the must-buy item for this season. Consumers must be made to understand the great importance of this item to the future of the economy and of the universe itself! This is of the utmost significance!

Indeed! However my Supplier has gorn bust. "Yaks are Us" couldent pay the hefty duty, not to mention afford the quartine periods. So sad. This world is doomed. ts high time we made a space ship to leave our warring brothers.

Oh no! If Yaks Backwards 'R' Us can't save us, nobody can! What is this world coming to? We must flee to a system that supports a yak based economy or all will be doomed. The end is near!

Indeed they are. So sad, for we where so close to a discovering the Yak Equivilent of hydorgen.

But stay away from di-yakogen monoxide. That stuff'll kill you.

Well that abouts end my ideas for what a Yak economy could bring us. We respect the of Yak of Yakdom, hopefully there is a world where you will be exepted by the populance.

Yeah. That's probably why yak economies are doomed from the start. There isn't really much one can do with a yak and it's a bit unhygenic to have them running around the streets, even if their owners keep them on leashes all the time.

Oh well no more yaks.

How tragic.

Now we need to come up with another subject to babble about and it's kind of difficult as I had to carefully remove my brain and lock it up this summer so it wouldn't get scared and run away while I wasn't using it.

I whould love to start up a new topic of conversation but I have exams tommorrow. So at the moment my brian is concentrating on that... Dew decimal numbers, c++, thesari, and other weird and wonderful thing of the programer and libarian are currently being revised...

Hence this http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F97207?thread=284359

That's a pretty exhaustive set of formulae you've come up with. I think one thing you forgot to include, however, is the Panic Factor, or the Oh Sh!t factor. This deals more with the amount of time you actually have to spend studying, rather the amount of time you've claculated to do so. It starts rising when you reach the end of your allotted mucking around time and still have one more chapter to read/one more level to beat/etcetera, and reaches its maximum at the time when you feel the need to exclaim oh sh!t when you notice the actual time. You also have to take into account the amount of time left before the exam and the amount of time you are willing to take away from your necessary life activities, sleep being the main one here.

So it would be something like
OSfactor=[time required to study]+/([time left]-[necessary living time])
When the value is greater then one, you're in trouble. This is the time when the title exclamation tends to be voiced, and after that the decision has to be made as to which part is more important, study or sleep. That would be made on personal factors only, such as which life activities are absolutely necessary, and exactly how important is this test, which you decided in earlier equations.

So let's say you have an exam at 8am tomorrow, and you need at least four hours to study completely for it. At 8pm you pick up a book to read for an hour (for anticipation's sake we'll make it the forthcoming Harry Potter book)and the will let you go to bed by 1, giving you the minimum of sleep required to wake up to your alarm in the morning. So at 10:30 you put the book down, realize what time it is, and at this point you have 4/(9.5-7) which gives a factor of 1.6. Now you have to decide if you think you can study 1.6 times faster than you had previously figured, whether you can deal with 1.5 fewer hours of sleep, or whether you should finish your book and then stay up all night. And there's probably another equation to fetermine that one too.

I was hopeing to cope with the panic factor in the Worry factor? I am sure that in there someplace or other. If the worry factor is at 100% then your so worryied about the exam that you should have some rest rather than worry about it, because I find that if I worry to much for an exam I fail it, or panic during it. If you have lernt all you are going to lern you may as well go sleep or watch "The Bill" whatevers happening.