Dear Nickelodeon, I've gotten
over how SpongeBob's pants are not actually square. I can ignore most of the
time that Gary's shell is not a logarithmic spiral. But what I cannot forgive is
that SpongeBob's pineapple house is a mathematical
impossibility. There's three easy ways to
find spirals on a pineapple. There's the ones that
wind up it going right, the ones that spiral
up to the left, and the ones that go almost
straight up-- keyword almost. If you count the number
of spirals going left and the number of
spirals going right, they'll be adjacent
Fibonacci numbers-- 3 and 5, or 5 and 8, 8 and
13, or 13 and 21. You claim that
SpongeBob Squarepants lives in a pineapple under
the sea, but does he really? A true pineapple would
have Fibonacci spiral, so let's take a look. Because these
images of his house don't let us pick it
up and turn it around to count the number of
spirals going around it, it might be hard to figure out
whether it's mathematically a pineapple or not. But there's a huge clue in the
third spiral, the one going upwards. In this pineapple there's 8
to the right, 13 to the left. You can add those
numbers together to get how many spirals
are in the set spiraling steeply upwards. In this case, 21. The three sets of
spirals in any pineapple are pretty much always
adjacent Fibonacci numbers. The rare mutant cases might
show Lucas numbers or something, but it will always be three
adjacent numbers in a series. What you'll never have
is the same number of spirals both ways. Pineapples, unlike people,
don't have bilateral symmetry. You'll never have
that third spiral be not a spiral, but just
a straight line going up a pineapple. Yet, when we look at
SpongeBob's supposed pineapple under the sea, it
clearly has lines of pineapple things
going straight up. It clearly has
bilateral symmetry. It clearly is not actually
a pineapple at all, because no pineapple could
possibly grow that way. Nickelodeon, you need to take
a long, hard look in the mirror and think about the way
you're misrepresenting the universe to your viewers. This kind of
mathematical oversight is simply irresponsible. Sincerely, Vi Hart.