It's the
season of heat waves and record high temperatures, we just has the highest
temperature in recorded history in Sydney. For Australian scientists, it is
also the season of writing grants and fellowships in order to find money to
support research and research staff. I'm currently working on an ARC Laureate
Fellowship application due Jan 31, and then after that we have ARC Discovery
Grants due Mar 6, and NHMRC Project Grants due Mar 19. Somewhere in that blur
of grant writing, teaching starts as well.
This leaves me badly in need of a
good laugh, so I thought I'd start a series of posts on scientific humour. And
I decided to start with this paper published in the British Medical Journal:
In this paper a group of
epidemiologists at the Burnet Institute carried out a careful statistical study
of the disappearance of teaspoons from lunchrooms at their research institute.
Their main findings were:
Subjects 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons
placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months.
Results 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons
disappeared during the study. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The
half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter
than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days).
The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons' value. The incidence of
teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years.
At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to
maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons.
I have this image in my mind of
someone building up a massive horde of teaspoons they wallow in like Scrooge
McDuck.
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| Nothing to do with teaspoons, but the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been forced to add new colours (purple) to their weather maps for ridiculously high temperatures (image from the ABC) |
