Bruce Cameron

Dec 04, 20130

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

Readers of this column know that I am highly critical of the government giving away vast sums of money to scientists who conduct studies about unimportant things when the money would be much better spent funding newspaper columnists who write articles about unimportant things.

For example, I think it was a waste of money to spend $1.2 million to study the breeding preferences of the woodchuck. Turns out they mostly prefer to breed with other woodchucks. Shouldn’t we instead have spent the money to determine, once and for all, how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if it only could chuck wood?

People have been asking that question for more than a century, whereas I can’t recall a single instance of someone asking me whether I knew exactly what woodchucks do on their third date. If I were to guess, I’d say that the male woodchuck takes the female woodchuck out for a nice dinner — say, a chuck steak — then invites her back to his burrow to watch a DVD (“Groundhog Day”).

Meanwhile, Australian scientists recently determined what happens when you give bees cocaine. The buzzed bees were enthusiastic about going out for nectar and were spotted dancing all night and spending a lot of time on their cell phones selling people shares of Enron. The scientists claim that observing how the bees behave on the drug gives us insight as to how humans behave on cocaine, though for that you could just study the life of Robert Downey Jr.

And $1 million was spent on a study to determine why people don’t like to ride their bikes to work. It was discovered that there were many factors, such as “flop sweat,” “the interstate highway system” and “winter in Wisconsin.” More funding will be required to determine why no one has ever sold a bicycle to a woodchuck.

Regardless of the reasons for their reluctance, we’d better figure out ways to get people on bicycles, because after a decade of study, a group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, has determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in jams for no obvious reason: It’s that there are too many cars on the road.

Sugiyama could probably have reached this conclusion in less than 10 years, but he was always late to work because of traffic. (One definition of the word “traffic” is “too many cars on the road, causing congestion.” Think of all the time that could have been saved if someone had just handed Sugiyama a dictionary!)

Not all scientific studies are frivolous. The Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health in Melbourne, Australia, recently launched an investigation into a strange phenomenon: They kept running out of teaspoons in the break room. (Or, as they put it, they conducted a “longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute.”)

In this controversial experiment, 70 teaspoons were placed in the break room and observed for five months, which had to be more exciting than just about anything except maybe watching a pair of woodchucks out on the town. At the end of the experiment, fully 80 percent of the spoons were missing, though they forgot to try to figure out why. (Professor Sugiyama is of the opinion that the reason the teaspoon drawer is almost empty is that there are so few spoons in there, though he would need another nine-and-a-half years to reach a conclusion.)

Speaking of spoons, a team headed by Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, has determined that people tend to eat more at all-you-can-eat buffets. In fact, they tend to eat all they can eat! (And yes, Professor Sugiyama, we would agree that the buffet line moves more slowly if there are more people in line.)

Now, all of the above information comes to me by way of searches on the Internet, though I never found the one I suspect must exist: a federal study to determine whether more money is needed to fund federal studies. This is a huge oversight that should be addressed as soon as possible.

I just need a few million dollars, and I’ll get right on it.

(Bruce Cameron has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron. com.)

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