ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

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From Amy Miller of Baltimore, MD:

Do you guys ever use Facebook, Twitter or other social connections?  I haven’t found any way to connect.  Is it something I said?

Sorry, Amy.  Richard fears Facebook- he’s afraid he’ll get electrocuted.  In fact, on the Says You! Facebook page (yes, there is one), they once posted the message:  “This person needs help being active.” “How,” worries Richard, “do they know that?”

We are attempting to enter the twenty-first century and hope to do so in the coming months… but we need your help.  What would you like to see?  Should we tweet, pinterest, instagram, foursquare, youtube, blog, microblog, honeycomb, Flickr or Link In?  Anyone- we hope you’ll weigh in on this perplexing problem and help us drop our anti-social behavior once and for all.

A Billion Here…A Billion There…

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From Travis Listing of Iron River, WI.

I just heard your round of Comic Nonsense, and you made a mistake, or rather Ben did (But I don’t want to blame a kid, so I’ll blame you). When going over how much Scrooge McDuck was worth, you put him at 28.8 billion dollars, but you failed to find the updated version of it. In 2011, it had jumped up to 44.1 billion due to a spike in gold prices, yet a website has tried to calculate the amount of money in his vault, and has come up with 27 Trillion dollars.

In other words…answers may vary. Also, his accountant was NOT another duck. It was more of a dog.

Thank you, Travis!

‘1’ is the Loneliest Number

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This week, we suggested a list of prime numbers- included was the number ‘1.’ In quick order there followed:

From Joe Prochaska of Nashville, TN:

One is not a prime number! But please, mention this only softly on the air, as this is one of my favorite bar bets.

From Peter Sirokman of Waltham, MA

There are many prime numbers, but the number 1 has never been among them.

And then this from ‘Audrey’ in East Providence, RI:

You’ll probably receive a ton of mail about this, but in tonight’s show, there was a mental math category in which you listed off the prime numbers. However, you made a mistake in this because you started with the number one. One is not a prime number. A prime number is defined as having exactly two whole number factors: one and itself. One has only one whole number factor: one. It should also be noted that one is not composite, either, because composite numbers have more than two factors.

Thanks to these folks- and the legions who followed- for checking our arithmetic.

Nuts to you…

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From Odile, from Arlington, MA:

The bluffing round just included an incorrect “correct” definition—the card defined “midden” as “a pile of nuts collected by a squirrel.” A midden is indeed a pile of nut-related material that a squirrel is responsible for accumulating, but it is neither collected by the squirrel nor, if the squirrel knows its business, are there any nutmeats in a midden. A midden is the pile of nutshells and other debris dropped by a squirrel as it eats. (Squirrels tend to sit on the same tree branch to eat, and the debris accumulates below.) It’s basically the squirrel’s garbage pile, which is how it relates to the archeological definition—a human midden is a trash pile of broken pottery, bones.