The amount of food eating and overreaction on Japanese TV sometimes drives me crazy, and I often think the variety shows are making the whole country dumber, but I have to give them some credit. Yes, there are plenty of shows that have semi-celebrities sitting around eating food, but there are also several quiz shows. Tonight, the wife and I watched one of these shows. One of the problems was science-related. They filled a large beaker with water, inverted a smaller second beaker, and put that second beaker into the large one. They then asked the contestants/guests to guess what would happen when they turned up the heat and it started boiling. (answer: The second beaker rises and falls, like the goo in lava lamps.) The next question was a geometry question. Even after the explanation, I still couldn't understand it. The wife and I spent several minutes discussing the properties of scalene triangles, which is no easy feat in a foreign language. (You'll have to ask the wife, though, as I only spoke English. Woops!) Now, I understand.

Anyway, that show has made me realize that I need to go back and study geometry. I forgot to mention that Kitano Takeshi came on and gave the answer for the geometry question. That guy's always laying some knowledge on fools.