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.