My FAVORITE THING is researchers who wholeheartedly embrace the Ms. Frizzle aesthetic and wear their field of study on their literal sleeve. Everyone in the invasive crayfish consortium has tiny lobster-print shorts or socks. All the middle-aged dad scientists here at the lab have shirts with fish and/or fishing tackle patterns on them. My moss specimen and ammonite earrings keep getting noticed by women who are wearing silver fishbone-shaped or native plant-themed earrings themselves. Every single person on the outreach team has at least one shirt with an anchor pattern on it from Old Navy, and almost all the younger researchers have tattoos featuring their research interests – one fisheries biologist has a half-sleeve of native species she literally uses as an outreach tool. We are self-aware and having a blast with it, honestly.
Before we begin, I’ll have to state my heartfelt belief that there isn’t such a thing as useless research. Sating our human curiosity is a perfectly good reason for conducting experiments and doing science; wanting to know more is part of what makes us human, afterall. Your research does not need to be immediately useful to be valuable.
But goddamn if some of that research isn’t just straight up funny as fuck.
Michael J. Donahoo of Baylor University, Gary N. Boone of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Tucker Balch of the Carnegie Mellon University. This is one of those papers which scratches an itch of curiosity you wouldn’t even know you had until reading it, but the fact that this is published as a professionally-worded scientific paper pushes it from “mildly interesting” to “crying laughing” levels of hilarity.
So, without further ado, let’s open this baby and dig in.
The title of this marvelous publication is already a gift in and of itself. Behold:
Oh boy.
Basically what is happening here is that they’re testing if the Coriolis effect produced by the Earth’s rotation has an effect on the midair rotation of cats. Even more briefly, the subject of this research is to see if cats rotate in different directions when dropped on different hemispheres of Earth.
Fuck yeah, science.
The authors, apparently, didn’t share my belief that no research is useless, because they felt the need to actually give a reason as to why this knowledge is immediately practical to the human race, beyond providing insight into feline physiology. Namely:
Imagine being lost in some remote part of the world, and having no idea even which hemisphere you’re on. The solution? Why, catch a cat and fucking drop it, of course! Though chasing after a cat to drop in the middle of bumfuck nowhere is probably an excellent way to get even more lost, but I digress. This is the peak of human comedy, guys. Everybody go home. We had a good run but nothing and nobody is ever going to top this.
So, now that we’re done with the first paragraph, let’s get to the actual meat of the article. Starting with the wonderful diagrams such as this one:
Looking at that silhouette I cannot shake the feeling that that’s Sylvester the Cat.
And of course, the organically home-grown Scientist Snark™:
Translation: “You’re dumber than a cat, Frank.”
“We don’t fucking throw the cats, but only because it would distort the experimental data. Yeah, that’s good. Write that down Frank.”
You know, “it would be horribly cruel and unethical” is a pretty good justification for not launching cats out of a goddamn cannon. You made the right choice here, guys.
And finally, after arduous experimenting, we get the fruit of the authors’ labors, namely this results table:
Behold: science.
I have a hunch that the high amount of disqualifications probably results from the pissed off test subjects clawing the shit out of our intrepid researchers. I know Iwould be angry as hell if some big lug in a labcoat picked me up, held me upside down and dropped me many times. I’d give that guy what for, that’s for sure.
And now, for the results!
Translation:
“MOTHER FUCKER IT CLAWED ME SO BAD”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t have turned it upside down, Frank. Cats don’t like that very much.”
I CALLED IT. In this case, “disqualification” is most likely science terminology for “fucking with cats is a bad idea”.
Translation: “None of our friends on the southern hemisphere believed we were serious when we told them they’d have to turn cats upside down and drop them like the beat.”
Explaining this to your colleagues must have been a wild ride. I wish I was there to see that.
Well out of the thirty experiments you had done, 27 were invalid, and none were conducted on the southern hemisphere, but sure, let’s go with that.
And finally, for the conclusions derived from this groundbreaking experiment:
Yay…?
That is NOT a sentence I ever expected to read in a scientific paper.
Okay, okay. Up to this point I was reading this paper in complete uncertainty whether you guys were just taking the piss, but now you left no doubts. Just how fucking bored were you?!
MOVE OVER SELF-DRIVING CARS, SELF-DRIVING CATS IS WHERE IT’S AT
THE FUTURE IS NOW FUCKERS
FFFFFFfhhhucking hell, people. Reading this paper was… an experience. I’ll make sure to travel to Stockholm next year when these serious and professional gentlemen inevitably win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I can’t wait to hear their acceptance speech, I’m sure it will be enlightening.
Moral of the story: don’t believe stupid movies that portray scientists as emotionless human robots scribbling away on their clipboards. They are equally bored as you, with the difference that they have the proper methodology to make their shitposting objectively correct. I mean, tell me this isn’t the most perfect meme format you have ever laid eyes upon.
You could tell me that, but I know you’d be lying.
I found this article while researching that ‘reptilian speech’ ask, and just had to share. Yes, the scientists actually had alligators inhale helium to measure their calls. Yes, it was legit science and actually gave us really good information. It’s also just ridiculous and I adore it. TL;DR, the frequency of an alligator’s call is a reasonable indicator of the size of the animal producing it.
I also learned from this (and the linked article within it) why helium makes your voice sound squeaky! In short, it’s actually the density of helium gas that makes the different. Helium is about seven times less dense than air, so your vocal cords can push on it faster and therefore the wavelength of the sounds they create is faster.
Imagine how confused those alligators were, though.
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
At one of the leading conferences for a certain branch of mathematics, there is an annual tradition of “walrus wrestling,” where the participants kneel on the floor with their hands behind their back and try to knock each other the fuck over. This takes place at the formal dinner.
Definitely a big reason I went into ecology was on my first undergraduate research outing watching my elderly herpetology professor get drunk, jump over a picnic table, and discuss wrestling alligators.
wow, look at this! the overhanging leaves.. on the shoreline are pretTHERES A CRAB
This is it. This is what zoo majors are.
Not just zoology students either. This is what a good amount of professional, published zoologists are like too.
I had a professor in one of my classes a few years back, talking to us about this frog species we were currently doing fieldwork on, stop mid-sentence and leap into the bush and didn’t return for a good 15 minutes because she heard the frog croaking.
I feel like there has to be some kind of botany joke in the similarity between the words “areoles” and “areolas”
I mean this is literally a cactus that exists so (that’s Montrose Myrtilocactus geometrizans)
Also there’s an entire genus of popular cacti, Mammillaria whose name legit means “nipple”
Also after brief googling, it seems the words are related, areole coming from areola. The areole is actually the little bud that cacti spines sprout from. Botanists have been looking at cacti for centuries and going “ah… a titty”
me, a 1800s botanist: *is first to name a beautiful result of evolution that has been evolving for longer than my brain can feasibly imagine*
me: look like titty..name titty bush
Humans have always been humans, even the smart ones.
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