Hippos (This time it's on topic)

If you go into second life, go under "help" and choose "about second life" you can see a whole bunch of neato information. But notice in the bottom box, after giving out all the license information and such, we get this line:

It's hippos all the way down...

Anybody have any idea what the heck this means, or what it's for? I'm pretty sure Phil understands, so if I could get a reply from you Phil, or maybe any other Lindens who know, that'd be awful nice of ya

I really don't feel like wrapping my brain around this one the way I already am with Matrix: Reloaded

hehe. i think its a reference to "A Brief History of Time". In it Stephen Hawking was telling about a public lecture he gave and at the end some old lady tells him it was all rubbish and that the world is really sitting on a giant turtle shell. So Hawking says, "Well then what is the turtle standing on?". And she says, "Very clever but its turtles all the way down!".

So the world is really on a giant hippo?

Well, it will be, once enough simulators are brought up to house it.

omg De Haro is the former Flying Venetian Hippo. No wonder I smell rotting hippo every time I go over there. hmmph. hippo effluvia.

Courtesy of Google and too much time on my hands:

A Brief History of Time begins with a striking image and a wonderful true story: An elderly lady attended a public lecture given by an astrophysicist on how the Earth goes around the Sun and how the Sun circles about with countless other stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. During the question and answer session, the woman stood up and told the distinguished scientist that his lecture was nonsense, that the Earth is a flat disk supported on the back of an enormous tortoise.

*Note I found another reference that says it's a disk, supported by 4 elephants, supported by a giant tortoise*

The scientist tried to outwit the lady by asking, "Well, my dear, what supports the tortoise?" To which she replied, "You're a very clever young man, but not clever enough. It's turtles all the way down!"

Although not intended by Stephen W. Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time and distinguished cosmologist at Cambridge Universe, the image of many turtles, each supporting the next may be viewed as a metaphor. Consider the following chain of questions. (1) What causes Earth's motion? The answer is, of course, gravity. The Sun pulls on Earth causing it to orbit in an almost perfect circle. (2) But what causes gravity? According to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, it is the curvature of space. (3) But what causes space to curve? Again, according to Einstein's theory, it is mass. (4) But why should mass cause space to deform? At this point, scientists can only say, "This is the way things are." Apparently, the theory of gravity rests upon not an infinite tower of turtles, but only on three. Scientists do not know what holds up the third turtle, but, perhaps, someday a fourth turtle will be found.