Open Letter to Nickelodeon, Re: SpongeBob's Pineapple Under The Sea

For more on Fibonacci and Plants: http://youtu.be/ahXIMUkSXX0
For more snail: http://youtu.be/xbsAUq_nvxE

Dear Nickelodeon, I've gotten over how Sponge Bob'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 Sponge Bob'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 spiral going left, and the number

of spirals going right, they'll be adjacent Fibonacci numbers.

Three and five, or five and eight, eight and thirteen,

or thirteen and twenty-one.

You claim that that Sponge Bob square pants lives in

a pineapple under the sea, but does he really?

A true pineapple would have Fibonacci spirals, so

let's take a look. Because these images of his house

don't let us pick it up and turn it around and 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 eight to the right,

thirteen to the left, you can add those numbers together

to get how many numbers are in the set spiraling steeply upwards.

In this case, twenty-one.

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 the third spiral be not

a spiral but just a straight line going up a pineapple.

Yet, when we look at Sponge Bob'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.