How to put off nuptials

Question: "I'll marry you on a month without a full moon, and no sooner," your sweetie says. She knows her heart and she knows her astronomy. So what's she trying to tell you?

Answer: This woman seems to want a Valentine's Day wedding since the only month with no full moon is February, with its 28 or 29 (leap year) days, says Suzanne Traub-Metlay of Fiske Planetarium, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Yet a full cycle of lunar phases is 29.5 days. Most recently in 1999, January had two full moons, February had none and March also had two. The second full moon in a month is a "blue moon," and while this is supposed to be rare, it occurs on average once every 2.7 years. A February without a full moon is much rarer—every 19 years or so.

So your elusive sweetie has set her wedding for February 2018. (How deep is your love?) What if her infant niece wants to wait for the next one — in 2037? That depends on where she lives, says Traub-Metlay. Since date and time are arbitrarily set by human guidelines like the International Date Line, a full moon on February 28 in Canada could be March 1 in Australia. If she lives in North America, the patient niece may need to postpone her nuptials to 2066.

Looks like those wedding bells might be destined for a little lunar eclipse.

Question: There are some roaring big numbers out there, such as the "talking number," the Coney Island number" and the "Ice Age number." Yet these are petty pikers before a googol (not google) or googolplex. Can you size these up?

Answer: The first is the number of words spoken by humans since the dawn of time, estimated at 10,000,000,000,000,000 (10^16), including all baby talk, love songs, congressional debates — roughly equal to the number of words printed since the Gutenberg Bible appeared, says Clifford A. Pickover in "The Mathematics of Oz." The Coney Island number is the number of grains of sand on that beach (10^20), the Ice Age number is how many snow crystals formed the Ice Age (10^30).

For a superbig science number, try 10^79, the total of electrons, protons and neutrons in the Universe. All big, yes, but not even close to a googol (10^100), and far less than a googolplex (10^10^100—1 followed by a googol zeros). As you know, there is no biggest number, since you can just add zeros to fatten any number, as many as the imagination can imagine.

Question: There's a distinctive taste common to mushrooms, sea tangle, cheese, tomatoes, asparagus and meats, but which is neither sweet nor sour nor bitter nor salty—the Classic Four. Can you name this "fifth basic taste"?