Meantime, Back at the Solipsist. Plus, "I'll Take Nobel Prize Winners Nobody's Ever Heard of for $1,000, Alex."

Plinky prompts:

"You just got a magic tree! What does it grow?"

"Animal face-off: In a fight between a 14-year-old and a goat, who would win?"

"If you had an unlimited supply of Lego, what would you build?"

OK, we made up that last one. But what's really fascinating is that we did NOT make up the other two. The "magic tree" question is today's. And, yes, that middle question was an actual Plinky prompt, too. We would truly love to hear the thought process behind that one.

It is an interesting question. Sadly, though, a definitive answer would probably run afoul of any number of statutes against child endangerment. Or cruelty to goats.

Oh, by the way: Money and a really sweet shed.

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While awaiting the call from the Nobel committee, we found ourselves watching the clock, wondering what time the polls closed in Oslo. This got us thinking about time zones.

Consider: As we write this, it is 4:08 pm Pacific Standard Time (e.g., California). It is 7:08 pm Eastern Standard Time (e.g., New York), and it is 12:09 am Monday in London. (Oslo, by the way is one hour ahead of London.) But what about that five hour "hole" between New York and London? It occurred to us that this covers the lines of latitude in the Atlantic Ocean. So, at this moment (4:12 pm, PST), it is 10:12 pm for absolutely no one. All right, maybe there are some ships at sea, but they're probably synced up with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), currently 11:14 pm. It seems that there are effectively no population centers that fall between the lines of latitude corresponding to one hour earlier than GMT.

We hereby claim possession of that time zone. We have completed today's post at 10:35 pm, Solipsist Meantime (sic).

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As a sort of follow-up to our post on President Obama's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize--and because we know Sloppists enjoy funny names--we thought we would provide a brief list of some of the more obscure Nobel laureates.

Theodor Mommsen (Literature, 1902)

Bjornstjerne Bjornson (Literature, 1903)

Tobias Asser (Peace, 1911)

Fridtjof Nansen (Peace, 1922)

George H. Whipple (Medicine, 1934)

Frans Eemil Sillanpaa (Literature, 1939)

Polykarp Kusch (Physics, 1955)

Sir Cyril Hinshelwood (Chemistry, 1956)

Salvatore Quasimodo (Literature, 1959)

Tjalling C. Koopmans (Economics, 1975)

Klaus von Klitzing (Physics, 1985)

Imre Kertesz (Literature, 2002)

(Yes, the Solipsist is officially out of ideas.)