If you're confused about school, work, friends, family, fashion, or physics, or are just looking for some up-front and honest advice, Bryan is here for you.

Direct inquiries and the most intimate confessions of your soul to advice@harlothouse.net.

Dear Bryan,
Dieting is hard, but I really want girls to like me. Do you have any suggestions?

The right girl will see your "inner beauty", and like you for your scintillating personality while ignoring the fact that you're disgustingly obese and keep trying to eat her. I know, I know, you're thinking "but Bryan, I don't have a scintillating personality and/or I want ass NOW! And all this thinking is making me HUNGRY!" Never fear, there's all kinds of excellent illegal surgery you can get done for this sort of thing, some of which is even straightforward enough that you can perform it yourself after a few drinks to steady your nerves.

Dear Bryan,
Is the color black in this season?

The term "color" generally refers to the response of your eyes to different wavelengths of light. Your eye, for example, perceives 500nm light as "green" and 700nm light as "red". "Black", when not used to refer to the popular ethnic minority, generally means the "zero point" of optical perception-- that is, the absence of light, and, therefore, color. So technically, black isn't even a color, and thus can't be "in" or "out" any more than empty space can be "in" or "out". Not that that's ever stopped the goth kids or anything.

Dear Bryan,
My friend is anorexic. What do I do?

Give me her number. Anorexic girls are hot.

Dear Bryan,
Say someone is suicidal..and well, their life really does suck.. I mean no joke. They have no reason to live; They've lost everything, and all they do is cry all the time without stopping. You want to tell them they have a lot to live for, but well..shit. What do you do?

The world's sort of building towards a population crisis, with six billion people and counting currently inhabiting this particular ball of rock. With that in mind, it seems like a waste to have someone who just isn't enjoying him/herself to continue consuming space and resources when they've lost all reason to live. Leaving knives, guns, or bottles of pills conspicuously around might help your friend do the globally-responsible thing and remedy this problem fairly quickly and painlessly.

If you're some kind of bleeding-heart, non-conservation-minded hippie, there's probably some kind of counseling or medicine or something that can help with this. I sure as hell don't know.

Dear Bryan,
I had sex with this guy I was seeing for a few months and then a few days later he broke up with me to date this fat foreign girl. I told him I was pregnant because I wanted to see him squirm but now I feel kind of bad about it. Should I confess that I made it up? Or is this all fair in the name of sweet revenge?

A principled advice columnist would probably tell you that what you did is morally indefensible and order you to admit your little lie at first opportunity. Fortunately for you, I am not that advice columnist. My only qualm with your plan is that you're only going so far as to pretend to be pregnant. Are you planning to try to get back together with him or something? Go out, get knocked up, and tell him the baby's his. Nothing says "sweet revenge" like 18 years of financially crippling child support payments!

Dear Bryan,
I really think you are a discredit to beautiful women everywhere. ALL women are beautiful, not just anorexic ones. We can't watch tv or flip through a magazine anymore without being told that our faces and bodies aren't airbrushed enough and the last thing this world needs is some dateless prick encouraging young women to starve themselves so he can have wet dreams over their skeletons.

While I'm sorry your fat ass can't lie there semiconsciously flipping channels without being told that your ass is indeed fat, I'm sure there's more you could be doing about it than firing off angry emails to snarky pricks on the internet. Plastic surgery, liposuction, and--god help me--exercise are just three of the countless more constructive ways to deal with the fact that you're a ridiculous hambeast. All of those require actually getting up though, so I may have accidentally undermined my own point there.

Dear Bryan,
Recently, I learned of the pregnancy of a friend of a friend. Instead of being happy, I was horrified. She weighs 260 pounds; the "lucky" guy weighs about 140. Being the world renowned physicist that you are, can you please explain to me how such a phenomenon could occur? Also being that they are both unattractive people, what are the chances of this child being socially acceptable?

In Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's controversial book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, they posit (among a whole bunch of other creepy things) that IQ has a tendency to "regress to the mean"-- that is, two smart parents are likely to have a child more "average" than both of them, as are two stupid parents. Empirical data has borne this out to some extent, but anyone who's visited Maine knows that the analogy doesn't hold for attractiveness; two ugly people are likely to produce elephant-man-style offspring, and seem willing to do so with alarming regularity (possibly because it makes them seem better looking? I'm a physicist, not a sociologist). I've crunched the numbers, and you probably won't be seeing this kid on "American Baby Idol" anytime soon.

To answer the first part of your question, Newton's law of gravitation provides a simple explanation. The law states that the gravitational force exerted by one body on another is given by:

Where F is the gravitational force, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two bodies in question, r is the distance between them, and G is a proportionality constant or something. When the boyfriend (we'll call him "m2") got too close (reducing r) to the girlfriend ("m1"), the force she exerted on him was simply too great for him to resist. Romantics may call this "love", physicists tend to refer to it as "falling down a gravity well". Either way, poor guy.

Dear Bryan,
I flunked out of med school a year ago and am working at Pizza Hut. How do I tell my parents? They've still been writing me a tuition check the past 2 semesters.

Over pizza? I don't know, I'll get back to you after I'm done flunking out of my Ph.D program.

Dear Bryan,
One of my brother's 17-year-old friends recently approached me and admitted to wanting to have sex with me. I'm 23 and he's a total hottie, just with an underage body. Should I cast aside the law and enter into this sexual taboo or should I call a backup babysitter?

Let me try a bit of role-playing here. I'm a 17-year-old loser in soul-crushingly boring high school and the opportunity arises to have sex with a much older, more experienced woman. OH MY GOD EW EW ICKY I'D BETTER RUN AND TELL THE POLICE RAPE RAPE RAPE! So yeah, I guess you'd better not.

Dear Bryan,
When my sister brings a boy home for the holidays, my parents oh and aw over her "serious relationship". yet, when i bring a girl home for the holidays, my parents just assume that i'm trying to tell them that i'm going to be a father. This isn't fair. How do I address this discrimination?

Duh. I've been extolling their virtues for quite awhile now so my answer to this one should be obvious: ANOREXIC GIRLS. The knocked-up status of an anorexic chick is immediately apparent to even the casual observer, so that should clear up any confusion. If you're already in a relationship, this can still work; it's not very hard to turn regular girls anorexic, it turns out.

Dear Bryan,
My step-sister is brutally hot. Is it morally wrong to seduce her?

I'm going to defer to the ultimate authority on this matter, the 1999 movie "Cruel Intentions" starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon. I watched it about eight times to be sure I had this right, and also because I kept slow-mo-ing it to try to catch a bit of tit, but from what I could gather you have to deflower up to a dozen vulnerable virgins, at which time you earn the right to get your stepsister in the butt if you haven't been hit by a car yet. That may seem counterintuitive, but Hollywood wouldn't lie to you.