Slashdot Mirror
The Great Stanford Buffy Population Equilibrium Study
Suture writes "A PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University has done an ecological analysis of humans and vampires in Sunnydale, the home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He took some initial assumptions on rates of population growth, vampire feeding, etc and plugged them into a differential equations model. What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable. His conclusion was that even though the show's designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a pretty cool spiral graph of human population vs vampire population."
and I thought I had too much time on my hands...
I got an Phd for making an essay about the fact that Star Wars could not be real... not in this galaxy nor any other!
are there enough vampires in sunnyvale to sustain the show for another season?
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
Spike: And I should do what with my spare time? Sit at home knitting cunning sweater sets? Ep: Out of My Mind
Just in case people think I have way too much time on my hands, I did a Google search and this was at the top of the list.
I must say the spiral curve the guy did looks a bit hallucinogenic... maybe he was on something?
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
OK, while I can certainly go along with watching second-rate actors in bad make-up and cute actresses, throwing around a few equations that no one is likely to examine, and one confusing graph...and earning (possibly) a PhD in the process, what really got my attention was the line:
"And to be fair, I'll tell you that my first order guesses, while probably not too far off, were chosen at least partly to obtain a reasonable result on our first try."
Now THAT is my idea of effort!
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
for next year's Ignobel awards.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
...all the demons, witches, and number of times Angel has been resurrected?
> what Archie and Betty and Veronica might have been up to?
.kids domain! ;)
A clandistine manage-a-trois our parents were thankfully unaware of? Bring on the
"Old man yells at systemd"
The article? Umm yes of course I read it. This is Slashdot, silly. :)
The graph looks almost like a bad drawing of Dante's Inferno. Each twist is yet another level leading to hell.
Which, since Sunnyvale is where the hellmouth is - it sort of all works out. In a strange, sort of demented way.
(I think I'll go watch the Buffy musical again. It's got class. It's got style. And until you burn up - it sticks with you for a while.)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
This paper isn't a thesis paper for pete's sake! It isn't a dissertation! It's OBVIOUSLY a lark. He's a fan of Buffy, and he decided to engage his brain and see what he could conclude about the Buffy-verse. It's a hoot, relax people.
-- L.
For good Buffy information (they had this story linked a while back I believe), check out Buffista. Their links page (http://www.buffistas.org/links.php) is quite extensive... Not bad.
And, of course, you have to check out TV Tome's Buffy page, with good reviews, show guide and spoilers...
Any other good ones?
even though the show's designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense
Maybe the writers did their research.
Successful shows usually have good writers who often do their homework.
Writers could even have first hand vampire experience!
You never know. Only a slayer can tell!
I don't get the novelty of this. It's the classic "Rabbits and Foxes" problem that any mathematics or engineering student should have been exposed to in a differential equations course. Tuning the free parameters in the equations was probably "Sunnydale" specific, but otherwise, what's the big deal?
- Buffy's success at finding a mate versus others' successes (hers should be assumed to be higher, which would increase the incidence of vampire-killing traits in the population),
- the (Dubya) Bush administration's environmental policy, and whether increased pollution is more harmful to the living or undead, and
- If you introduce population genetics to "The WB Frog," will he suddenly change sex and have the potential to bear young (as do amphibians when populations are all female, i think)?
the plot thickens...
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
This looks like a clever way to exercise one's professional tools to solve a trivial yet interesting problem. Why are all of you whiners jumping on him?
One factor that he left out was the attrition of vampires due to recovered conscience or suicide, which might be high considering their lifestyle. There must be a percentage of vampires that accidentally get caught in sunlight as well, although those dim bulbs might be the kinds that get slayed eventually anyway. Other than that the numbers look good.
I can't beleive this paper got published, are you kidding me? He fails to take into account trolls and werewolves, which would skew the numbers towards vampires, as they are natural allies. I too am scientist in the field of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and am preparing my own study, but unlike this quack I'm not throwing it out unfinished in the hopes of garnering awards and acclaim. I hesitate to think of the damage that will be done when people use these figures in their studies.
It seems the author is forgetting about Angel --- Buffy spinoffs could make m, the rate of vampire migration negative. And should the exodus of VC's from Silicon Valley count as ex-migration of humans or of vampires?
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
I mean, I didn't know here was a spirograph plugin for Photoshop. But "bad", I mean, you have to be really good to draw lines like that close together with a tablet, or even a mouse.
::clicks on link to bakla.net::
Oh wait, you're not replying to the article are you.
OMG!!!!
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I just found out that even if Angel were still on the air, Doyle would not be coming back. On Tuesday Glenn Quinn, the actor who played Doyle, died of unrevealed causes. More on this here.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I mean, come on! That is as bad as being one of those guys that constantly goes to a website, telling himself that it's "intelligent and newsworthy", but really just wants to post a load of crap to the net so that others might find him cool.
Oh, shit, wait, I didn't mean.... damn.
actually, vampires can have kids with humands. Angel did it in his TV series, causing quite a plot element.
Of course, it might be that vamps require a soul to be fertile...
I'm venturing on to a gray area of on-topicness, but...
For those of you who don't know, Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also has another genre show called Firefly.
I just watched the latest episode (War Stories) tonight, and believe me when I tell you that if it hasn't aired in your timezone yet, you do not want to miss it. This one episode has got more character development, action (and I mean combat) and humor (and none of that slapstick stuff) than the entire season of Enterprise so far.
Again, if you like Buffy (and even if you don't), don't miss tonight's Firefly. This one deserves high ratings, but that can only happen if people know it's being aired. So now you know.
What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable.
The Camarilla Princes are going to be really pissed when they find out they've been running at ( 1 / 10^5 ) / ( 18 / 36346 ) of their optimal capacity.
We Sabbat knew better, of course.
Cousin Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
They're ignoring the Infinite Alternate Universes theory as posited by Dr. Qrlang in New Superman #35.
is that it's remarkable how (after making basic assumptions) the very ideas of a stable vampire/human equilibrium are sound, and they are consistent with the "normal" Buffy universe. Many television shows and movies are mathematically improbable in even the most basic sense (like the ecosystem in the Matrix, for example). More importantly, we can assume that this was not intentional on the writer's part, I'm sure they wouldn't even grasp the "classic problem"; they probably didn't study engineering or mathematics in school. What the author of the study doesn't state, but I will, is the implication of his exercise in intellectual masturbation taken with the previous assumption.
Why would it work out, what made these writers different than other writers? I think it's a plot driven element, and a reflection of the real causes of social attitudes. I'm willing to venture a guess that they (the writers) kept the number of vampires and incidents in the series low so that it would seem more likely people wouldn't realize that there were real vampires around in the fictional Buffy scenario. From this, we determine vampires could exist in stable equilibrium if this was the case. If the prey on the show knew about the predators in a larger sense, the equations wouldn't be so simple any longer, and the stable equilibrium would be lost. What we consider "under the radar" and thus unnoticed is a perfect niche for small, select groups of predators to operate within, in REAL life. So in conclusion, the writers are clearly not buffoons, and your neighboor IS a vampire.
QED.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Right. Because Ph.D. students never have free time. They spend all their time on serious, groundbreaking research, only. And Ph.D. students never have their own webspace. If it's on the Internet, it must be a serious, peer-reviewed, critically analyzed piece of high academic merit.
;)
And in that supposed "free time" that Ph.D. students don't have, they'd never think about writing a mock paper using some differential equations that any second-year science student would understand because it amuses them.
For Christ's sake, the guy watches Buffy (Yes, Ph.D. students at Universities do other things besides do research and contribute to "political, social, and scientific development;" sometimes they even watch television!) and ran some variables through a model, wrote up a silly paper, and published it on his web page.
It's funny. Laugh.
More importantly, we can assume that this was not intentional on the writer's part, I'm sure they wouldn't even grasp the "classic problem
I'm not sure that's fair to the writers and directors. The predator-prey/vampire-human problem is fairly fundamental to the internal realism of the show, and IMO the writers of Buffy took care to try and keep the internal realism of the show fairly high.
Did you think, at all, before you wrote that? What do you think "equilibrium" means?
In dynamics, an equilibrium point is a steady-state of the system: that is, a set of values for the system such that, if the system is set to that point, the system will no longer change.
What do you think "stable" means?
In this context, "stable" means that, if you move the system slightly away from the equilibrium point, it will naturally move back to the equilibrium point. On the other hand, an unstable system, when perturbed from the equilibrium point, will not return to that point.
So, for example, the point of an inverted cone is an unstable equilibrium point. I can balance a ball on it, and it won't go anywhere; but move it ever-so-slightly, and it will fall down. On the other hand, the bottom of a conical pit is stable; move the ball anywhere up from the bottom, and it will just fall back down again.
These are basic definitions for this sort of mathematics. It probably wouldn't hurt, under the circumstances, to assume the author knows what's he talking about, you know.
Bjorn Christianson
A stable equilibrium is one that's robust to little nudges - it tends to go back towards the equilibrium point all by itself.
An unstable equilibrium is more like a ball on top of a hill. It's in equilibrium because it isn't going anywhere; but the equilibrium is unstable because a small push will destroy this particular equilibrium permanently.
That's the concept underlying the big spiral graph, by the way.
This has been said 6 times or so already, please take away the insightfulness modding.
Dan--
:) The real problem is I'm not sure if you joking or not :)
Normally I'm a big fan, but really this seems unrealistically harsh. This entire thing couldn't have taken him more than a couple hours, and I'm sure as a sum total many many more hours are wasted by PhD students WATCHING buffy than presenting this. And probably orders of magnitude more than that are spent reading and posting to slashdot! (to say nothing of the work force
Give me a break. The guy is flexing the intellectual muscles that he's gained during his population ecology studies. It's a little bit of fun and I'd rather he did this than many other things.
You think the internal realism of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is really high? By exactly what definition of reality? Buffy is a low budget vampire and hot chick based soap drama for godsake!
Where in heck does this #"$& soviet jokes come from? Did it originate here, like the "insensitive clod" and Natialie Portman? Or is something like "All your base are belong to us"?
J.
It is without a doubt established that buffy is hot, how many male vampires will forsake their own kind to nail buffy??? This must be calculated into the equation.
He assumes that buffy and her gang slay 6 vamps per year. I've seen single fight-scenes with a higher score than that.
Assuming an average of 3 Vamps dusted per episode, and there are, what, about 24 episodes per season? That's 72 per year, or 4 times the total vamp population !
Mind you, you could change your assumptions for Vampire 'birth rate' to have each vamp sire a new one on average every 3 months, and the sums would probably work out ok.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Brian Thomas is a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University in California. He used MATLAB (running on a Sun Solaris 2.7 workstation and commanded remotely through Telnet) to manipulate equations and run the model. He'd like to thank Dr. Joan Roughgarden for teaching him the vast majority of what he knows about population dynamics, and he would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this little treatise, because he is keen on spending a goodly portion of his career communicating science to intelligent but non-technical audiences (like you!).
Think of this as a lego story. Sure maybe its silly and pointless, but it was fun for the guy who did it. And for chrissakes he did it on he's free time FOR FUN. This isn't his dissertation, no tax dollars were harmed in the production of this paper. He just HAPPENS to be a PhD candidate, and student of ecology.
Why not fork?
It started with this comedian (Yakov Smirnov) who made jokes about the US vs. dead USSR right after the cold war. In particular the jokes would switch subject and object around the verb (which you can do by accident if you're Russian struggling with English). For example, "in South Cali, you can always find a party. In old Soviet Russia, the Party finds YOU!!!"
::coy smile::
In any case, this was picked up by Family Guy and The Simpsons recently, involving a russian language feature of one of those navigation computers in a car. I assume this is where the Slashbots picked it up. Trolls use it at the drop of a hat now, without thought.
I, on the other hand, am genuinely trying.
PS - The believe whole "insensitive clod" thing has an origin on British TV of yesteryear, and then later in crusty manpages and fortune files. It surfaces on slashdot because we're into that sort of crap. We spell demon with an æ (aelig) too!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I imagine the forums goons over at Fark and Something Awful have a lot to do with this particular cliche.
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
He is not getting a PhD for this, no one is considering or has ever considered getting a PhD for this. No one has even implied that this is the case.
So I guess your real problem is that Slashdot doesnt have "Fucking Moron" listed as a reason. [I do protest this, I sorely wish for a "Fucking Moron" option, as I have been forced to mod many non-trollic posts as 'troll' simply because it is the closest option availible]
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Have you ever watched it?
And I mean really watched it, sat down and watched the two-hour roughly-in-order shots on FX at 7:00 EST?
It's quite possibly the best-written low-budget hot chick show ever. Every inconsistency is either explained away or simply believable, given a simple modicum of suspension_of_disbelief.
Contrast this with, oh, Star Trek or Andromeda or Farscape, or the other common "sci fi" series setups, and you'll see the "internal realism" he was talking about.
I admit, I'm not the most knowledgeable on the shows and haven't watched much. I just occasionally caught brief glimpses of what appeared to be vampire based 90210 with only one hot chick.
As opposed to the really exiting stories like:
Another No-name company adopts linux
Intel releases faster processors
Microsoft products have bugs
New software released
DMCA used in another crappy suit
Another stupid patent granted
Come on. If Slashdot was meant to be exciting, it wouldn't be news for nerds.
Note: The above is not flamebait or trolling, it was self depreciating humor.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Universities used to be hotbeds of politicial, social, and scientific development, thought, and research.
That stopped being true the moment College became a natural extention of ones learning and not for the professionals. Let's face it, so many people that have a degree would have been better off just entering the work force. Their degree does nothing for them, they're still low paid and they're 4 years behind practical experience.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It doesn't take into account how the citizens feel. Having grown up in a town of 40,000, I can tell you that one murder was pretty big news. I can only recall hearing about murders two times during my ten or so years living there. Even assuming that I missed a few, that still wouldn't account for 18 vampires feeding once every three days (that's 2190 deaths per year--13 percent of the total murder rate for the ENTIRE UNITED STATES (~16000/yr)).
Anybody with half a brain would have moved out of that town long ago... and people ceratinly wouldn't be moving in.
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Actually, if you are looking for good buffy information, you need to go outside and get some fresh air.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
..but firefly is one of the best shows, ever.
The show has great characters, great writing, some of the best villians, great action sequences, surprise tweists and really cool effects.
But in tonight episode, that had all that AND a lesbian encounter.
in short...
Best...show...ever.
Smile, it was funny.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
them walking around doesn't bother you? you are a geek. Welcome, friend.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"...sometimes they even watch television!"
;)
yeah, but Buffy?
It's funny. Laugh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It takes a handful of episodes to 'get it'. It really is phenominally deeply well written. It also has self parodying fluff on top that is, at it's best, witty banter that rivals Oscar Wilde. Once you're in, you realize that these are really well written episodes. As you watch, you realize the season has a structure. As you watch seasons, you realize that the seasons have a pattern and the entire show, has a structure where things from season three play out in season six, and themes that are treated one way in season two (when they are in high school) are revisited and reexamined in season six (when she's trying to raise her little sister after her mother dies).
It does parody itself, but it's a tongue in cheek, knowing parody when it does. Buffy will acknowledge in side comments about her wardrobe. In season five and six, when things get much more 'real' and very gritty, they still have their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and Johnathan), who lighten things up, but wind up with a similar end.
Good writing, surprisingly good acting (even Sarah Michelle Gellar, who I thought was a ditzy figurehead of the show until Season 5's 'The Body')... it's a great show. There's a reason some people say it's the best thing on television.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You can major in GameBoy if you know how to BS.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I remember High School. I remember when someone died. One guy got drunk and jumped onto the highway.
One had a disease and died from that.
I think there were two others - people I didn't know. I went to a High School of about 2000 in Orlando, Fl.
If there was JUST ONE person at my high school whose neck was nearly ripped out and blood drained, it would have been a big deal - it would have seemed unreal.
I remember watching an episode of this show where the principal was eaten by a pack of werewolves, who themselves were students who were later killed.
And in the graduation episode, the mayor turned into a giant monster and destroyed the school.
Someone from the High School dies almost every episode. There is no way this is realistic . There is no way this accounts for a stable population - its B.S. Vampires aren't the only thing that kill in Sunnydale.
Of course, I must admire such a great work of BS.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Actually, the biggest false assumption I can see here was the number of kills Buffy does. This was raised in series four when she was talking to the initiative, discussing the number of kills she had. From memory, it was thousands, or several per night (which is pretty much in keeping with what you see on the show). Even at one per night (way too low from what I've seen) that would be 365 per year, or alot more than was assumed on the web site.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I knew I was at a geeky college (Johns Hopkins) when the prof. proved during the first day of advanced inorganic chemistry thant dilitium crystals were chemically and energistically unstable and could not be created. Of course we didn't look into other things which might have made it feasible.
I thought "Wow, this is really funny", and then I was somewhat disapointed that the cyrstals couldn't work. Kinda like being told there was no Santa
..........FULL STOP.
It's never that simple, is it? You always have the extra unexpected/unpredictable element : Yah, even in case of vampires. Consider Blade ][; it wasn't just vampires and humans. You have the daywalker(aka blade) and you have the reapers. I guess the large number of vampires can be attributed to the larger size of the study area.
The equation between vampires and humans is interesting; but why ignore these other elements? (unless ofcourse this is a BUFFY fan analysis)
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
There must be someone out there prepared to sponsor a Chair of Imaginary Population Studies and give this guy a job.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Rabbits and foxes are not a good model since humans can and would leave the area as fast as they could. Even Willow wouldn't be enough to keep me around that bloodbath. Probably. Well...
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
False.
Well, technically you're correct.
Private students regurarly get massive financial aid - more than public school students because of higher costs - which is either grant based or in the form of subsidized loans.
Get a grip, you speak as if they're just pissing it away on any schmuck. Nitpicking on subsidized loans is ridiculous. The taxpayer and shylock loses the percentage difference in interest, defaulting loans, and potential investment income from the taxed. As for grants, they're heavily skewed towards the poor, and they require some form of academic performance to maintain the grant. Or they are part of the payment for service in the Armed Forces. On the graduate level, there is much better rate of return from the grant.
They are in fact wasting valuable tax money with this crapola. Plus, these Unversities get tax breaks, research grants, etc.
Its a government investment in its intellectual talent. Bottom line is that we're better off investing in bright poor people to go to college, where we'll see payoff in higher salaries to tax and to fill critical knowlege positions in the future. Grants on the graduate level are quite competitive and they are not being doled out for basket weaving classes. Its surely a better use of tax dollars than bumbling NASA, or initiating an armed conflict in Iraq, or subsidizing agrocorporations.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
in fact, it says so right AT THE TOP OF HIS WEB PAGE!!!
And now, for your amusement and stimulation,
Just affirms my (and other's) belief that NO ONE reads the articles before posting.
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What a coincidence. Are you employed? Then what are hell you doing here reading and posting to slashdot? You should be focusing on your job, like those Ph.D candidates. (Do we have to spell it out to you, ITS NOT REAL DOCTORATE WORK!)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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By your logic, military personnel, whose wages are fully subsidized by taxpayers, should not be allowed to sleep or eat, and certainly should not be granted leave or R&R, because every minute of that time could be spent hunting from Osama Bin Laden or invading Iraq. That's just a small subset of government personnel, all of whom are on taxpayer's tab, and all of whom are given sleeping time and eating time and vacation time and sick leave, which is an immeasurable waste of taxpayers money.
Also, by your logic, if your company were to receive a government contract, your logic says that I, a taxplaying citizen, get to rescind all your free time because all that free time is pissing away my tax money.
This guy did this in his free time. The fact that he had some free time and a creative outlet might indirectly (or maybe even directly) inspire him to develop a cure for cancer, in which case that free time pays for itself. Depriving him of all free time and creative outlets almost certainly would result in him going insane, in which case your imagined tax dollars are wasted anyway. Give him (and grad students and researchers everywhere) a break--they deserve it.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
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Without showing you the really ugly math (after all, this is a family forum),
repeat after me all maths is fun and wonderful. Mathematically, we need a little bit of matrix algebra. We start by constructing a Jacobian matrix, ....
We could do all of that right here, but frankly I don't enjoy it. Besides which, I can just about guarantee that you are more interested in the ecology of vampire populations than in their theoretical mathematical peculiarities.
He's a very naughty boy, hes's insulted my mathematical sensibilities, so I'm not going to play with him any more, :-)#
seriously thats a fun article.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Did you think, at all, before you wrote that? What do you think "equilibrium" means?
It is possible to have unstable points of equilibrium. As a matter of fact, in chaotic systems, stability is a range, not a quality.
For instance, chaoticians talk about stability vs. small perturbations as seperate from basic stability.
As an example, there is a Lagrange point of gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun. This is a point where the gravity of the earth equals the gravity of the sun. All the forces of the system balance out and cancel. Unfortunately, this point is not stable, even against small perturbations. Any perturbation, even one caused by random atomic motion (i.e. "heat") is enough to cause one force to be greater than the other. In other words, while this system has a point of equilibrium, it tends not to be in equilibrium.
However, there are other systems that tend towards equilibrium. A spherical pit is an example. A marble at any location in the pit tends to drive the system toward it's point of equilibrium; where the marble is in the bottom center. If you perturb the marble in any way, it will tend to come back to rest in the center. If you perturb it hard enough, it CAN fly right out of the pit. So there's a certain amount of perturbation that the system is stable against. Make a bigger pit or a heavier marble or steeper sides and you increase that stability. Make the pit shallower or smaller, or lighten the marble and you decrease the stability.
If you were a physicist, you would characterize this system as having a certain stability, represented by the amount of work required to push the system out of equilibrium. For instance, if you had to push the marble at 10 Newtons for 1 second to just barely push it out of the pit, you could say that the system is stable against 10 Newton-seconds, which I believe are called Joules.
Make the pit so shallow that its perfectly flat, and the system has an infinity of equilibriums, that is at every point the forces in the system balance, but no stability; the system doesn't prefer to be in any particular state.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Even government employees (soldier, civil servants, etc.), who are directly compensated by taxpayer money, have free time--hours when they aren't working which they can spend sleeping or eating or shopping or watching TV or analyzing the population dynamics of Buffy or reading Slashdot. This graduate student is only indirectly compensated by taxpayer money, if at all--why can't he have free time and why can't he spend his free time doing whatever he wants (laws permitting)? You seem to think that by accepting governmental funding, graduate students should become academic slave labor. I find that notion offensive and hypocritical and, in protest, I will continue waste your tax money by sleeping and eating and doing whatever the hell I want (like reading and posting on Slashdot) on weekends. :-p
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
If the future of the academic elite cannot crack a joke without the rest of society jumping all over him... I weep for the future.