Dear Ask the Fish,
Shouldn't "WHERE'S MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND?" be in the FAQ? It's certainly the most frequently asked question on the site (or maybe second most, next to "Huge?").
-Douchin' in Detroit

Dear Douchin',
While I wasn't even going to dignify this answer with a response, I do have to compliment you on your use of punctuation. I'm very impressed. E.B. White would be proud. I mean, '?").' is not a trivial string to lay down. There's a fine line between that and Q*Bert cursing. Good job!
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
I've been having doubts about the way science has been approached for the past few hundred years. I think it's high time for a breakthrough in the way we approach our understanding of the world. Do you have any ideas to get me started?
-Unemployed and Sitting in Barnes and Nobles

Dear Unemployed,
You're a few weeks too late. There's this guy named Stephen Wolfram who just wrote a book. He got a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech when he was 20 (so he's way smarter than any of the jackasses who write for or read this site). He proposes that the way humanity has been approaching the activity of generating coherent worldviews is completely wrong; generating equations which describe the behavior of things is an activity which is doomed to failure, because the universe is not a seamless/continuous structure. Rather, space-time is discretized, and can better be described in the language of algorithms and rule sets (i.e. computer algorithms).
We here all suggest that you take the time to read the book, as it may completely change the world. And quit your bitching about it's length - you're adults, and should be able to read anything, even if it's over a 1200 pages. Get over it. It's titled A New Kind of Science.
One side note before we get to the rest of your question. I (Kennyb) feel SO INCREDIBLY VINDICATED by this theory, since it totally backs up my own opinion that there is no such thing as an analog clock, just really fine-grain digital ones. His reasons might be different, but cellular automata are cellular automata, so put that in your dogfish pipe and smoke it!
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Why do you link to Ann Landers and Dear Abby at the top of the Ask the Fish page? Why not link to someone hipper, like that guy from the Onion who writes about buttsex all the time?
-Advising in Adelaide

Dear Advising,
That's an editorial decision that was made by the home office in Elmira, New York. Interestingly enough, Dan Savage (the gentleman you were referring to who talks a fair amount about buttsex in his syndicated advice column in the village voice and the onion) was involved in making the decision to not have his column mentioned at the top of Ask the Fish. When it was brought up to him, he started screaming about "those goldfish killing maniacs." We tried to explain that no fish were actually harmed in the experiments, but he didn't beleive us.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
If you're getting married, it's a good idea to put off finalizing the invite list until the very last minute if that means temporarily avoiding conflict with your parents, right? Right?
-Prenuptial in Praetoria

Dear Prenuptial,
Well, I suppose if the conflict is going to come sooner or later, you might as well make it sooner, to be perfectly honest. But really that only stands if you are sure that there is going to be only a single conflict over the whole thing. The problem is, if you have the argument way before the wedding, that leaves a lot of time to have more arguments as the date gets closer and closer.
Ideally, you have the argument the day of the wedding. This assures that there will only be a single day on which the argument can take place AND it puts it on a day when no one wants to have a conflict anyway. It'll all get swept under the rug. Of course, since the whole things is about the invite list, that may be a difficult thing to pull off, but you're resourceful I'm sure.
On the other hand, as long as the entire ATF triumverate is invited, the finalized list doesn't matter much. I've always wanted to go to the wedding of someone else's imaginary friend.

-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Remember a couple weeks ago when they were saying that Einstein's general theory of relativity was going to be proven wrong or something like that? What's up with that anyway? And will this cause Uncle Al's Scientist Card to go down in value? My babymomma was counting on that money to pay for the little one's education.
-Spacetimecontinuumed in Speonk

Dear Spacetimecontinuumed,
Well, SIS, I'm not sure that we should just jump out and say that the laws of relativity were going to be proven wrong. The thing is, countless experiments (both actual and gedanken, have been performed which have shown that the Special Theory of Relativity (Special as opposed to General, not Banal) holds to an incredibly high degree of precision. (NB: The special theory of relativity states pretty much that there is no causal influence that can travel faster than the speed of light).
Now, I believe the thing you are referring to is the set of experiments involving atomic clocks on the space station that will be carried out in the next couple of years. Now, unfortunately, I couldn't find any real information about what exactly the experiments are going to be testing. But from what I've read combined with my knowledge of relativistic physics (I know, a fish with a solid background in relativistic physics? What can I say, I was brought up in an excellent school. >/rimshot<), I believe that what they are doing is putting these highly sensitive time measuring devices in a particular environment (0g), and attempting to show that this causes a violation of the Lorentz symmetry property (which sort of means that the universe favors one direction over another, temporally speaking).
Now, that being said, don't repeat any of this to a particle physicist since she'd laugh at our understanding of the topic, but it's good enough for us lay-fish. And don't worry about the value of Al's card dropping - even if these atomic clock experiments show Special Relativity to be only an approximation instead of something more exact, it's still something that took a whole lot of brains to figure out. It's not like they're not going to rescind his Nobel Prize or anything.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
I have a feeling that you're not going to keep that dog picture up for much longer, and that pesky fish will be back. The thing is, I will miss that scrappy little fellow. Is compromise between dog and fish possible?
-Canine in Catalonia

Dear Canine,
Look. Do you really think I have nothing better to do all day than photoshop dog heads onto fish bodies? Please don't waste our time with drivel like this anymore.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
So, what *would* Jesus do?
-Questioning in Quebec

Dear Questioning,
Funny you should ask, actually. Recently, I've been researching the question "What Would Jason Dill Do?" (WWJDD?), and as a result have been finding out a fair amount of what jesus would do (just the way the searches have been working out. Oh, and in case you were wondering, evidentally what Jason Dill would do is freeload on the Osbounes and burn the griddle.) Right, but back to Jesus. Well, we at the Fish have been looking at a number of Christian ministries online, and from what we can tell, what Jesus would do is produce an album and market crazy amounts of jewelery. Oh, also there's a fairly good chance that he would love everyone and bring a message of tolerance and understanding to the world, and then get crucified for his troubles (ref: The Holy Bible). But as far as I can tell from the online ministries, that's after he rakes in the cash. Which brings me to an interesting question: Assuming JC had a net connection, what do you think is cache looks like? Also, what browser would he use? Send what you think, and why, to whatdoesjesususe@alltooflat.com.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Such a disaster! One of my minidiscs has had it's table of contents corrupted, and I really need the data that's being held on it. Is there anything I can do to get the data back? Please help!
-Fucucked in Philly

Dear Fucucked,
Follow these links: