I'm serious, if we meet in person and it turns out that you don't think that you can eat 40 or something, I am going to have a hard time liking you.

Dear Zulk

Dearest Zulk.

I have this friend whom I love and really means a lot to me as, you know, a person and stuff. But for some reason I'm really bad at keeping in touch with her for most of the time. Then, when we finally do get together (which only happens, like, once a year, maybe!) we have these really random, fabulous yet weird times. Like seeing a lizard, a snake and an alligator on a foray outside, all within 10 minutes of each other! How can I let this person know how much I love her and also do a better job of keeping in touch in the future?

Well, I'm sure this person, whoever it is, would be pleased to hear such a thing from you, and hopefully you have the kind of relationship where your friend understands that you're not necessarily the "talk every week" type. Tell her this if it's not the case. Also, perhaps her birthday is coming up. You may want to buy her something extravagant, perhaps even outrageous, from one of her favorite stores.

Meanwhile, I think you should make a plan that won't be hard to keep, something that starts general such as "We will see each other in 2004!" and then narrow down to the month, the week, the location, and so on.

And did I mention again that her birthday is, er, might be coming up?

How do astronomers measure the distances to galaxies that are millions or even billions of light-years away? I understand that trigonometric parallax can be used to measure distances out to only a couple of hundred light-years away. How do we get from there to the edge of the universe? I have a sneaky suspicion the answer lies in my tricked out aqua Pinto, could that be so?

Well you have done it. You have stumped Dear Zulk on the second round of questions, thank you very much. You may wish to know right now that things like math and science are not my forte. I took Science for Dummies in college and had to withdraw. I took Math for Dummies in college and walked away proud with a C-. I probably lose hundreds of dollars a year because if I am dining out with friends and the bill has to be split up, I say, "Just tell me what I owe," instead of actually figuring it out myself.

I also kind of have a fear of space. Part of it is from the movie "Space Camp," wherein some poor innocent kid gets lost in space and from what I recall, is intimated to have died a horrible, painful, lonely, scary death. Part of it is that space is scary in its hugeness. And another part of it goes back to how you need math to study space, and I suck at math.

That said, I figured I'd take a wild guess. Trigonometric parallax--the tiny, apparent back-and-forth shifts of nearby stars caused by our changing perspective as the earth orbits the sun--can indeed be used to measure distances only to comparatively nearby stars. Some of the best data on stellar positions in the sky come from Hipparcos, a spacecraft launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency. Hipparcos has measured the trigonometric parallaxes of about 10,000 stars to an accuracy of better than 10 percent, out to a distance of about 300 light-years. But our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across, so parallax measurements become useless long before we approach the distances to other galaxies*.

But that's probably wrong.

When they make a movie about you, who would you like to play you?

I've given this a lot of thought and basically I think the only way this can go down is if the director chooses an unknown actress, but halfway through production, everyone realizes that she can't really quite capture my essence, and rather than scrap the film, they have me come on and play myself. They keep this change in the final product so everyone can see how great it is to see me playing me.

There is actually sort of a true story behind why I feel this way, but that's another story for another time. But if history repeats itself, then this movie will be almost as good as "Showgirls."

Got a question for Dear Zulk? Do you?

*actually came from this website.