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Airspeed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow
An anonymous reader writes "Finally, the question is answered: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? A designer with too much time on his hands uses his new method for graphically representing Strouhal numbers to clarify a truly pressing question for all armchair zoologists (and a few Monty Python fans)."
I hate to say it, but this is one of those things like the explanation of where the immortals in Highlander came from -- we didn't actually want to know.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
In reality they have to bid and win for the money to do such things, against stiff competition. Just think of the talent, skill and dedication that went into convincing a biscuit manufacturer to fund such research. Can you imagine standing up in front of a review board and pitching that? The man's a genius.
I'm guessing that this swallow work was a personal project, but this also was a work of genius. After all, most of their research will go into a dry and dusty journal. Nobody will read it, nobody will notice. However this will be quoted for as long as some smartarse quotes Monty Python. The publicity and the (indirect) fame is well worth the small effort involved.
Getting your name known, and getting contacts and work as a result, is as much a part of science today as actually discovering new knowledge. This is just marketing, but without the dodgy haircuts and inflated salaries.
Perhaps you are able to sit in your chair at home and, using purely a priori reasoning, arrive at conclusions that others must use empirical investigation to achieve. And perhaps, once the scientists have arrived at those answers through painstaking quantitative research (as in the case of the authors of the Nature article), you enjoy pointing out that you reasoned your way there without the messiness of actual research. Fair enough.
But even if the discovery made wasn't surprising to you, it was interesting enough to make it into Nature. And the author of the style.org article on Strouhal numbers was clearly concerned not so much with the discovery as with the graphical representation of the information discovered. He is, after all, a designer.
In other words, you may benefit from spending a little more time trying to figure out what people are doing, and a little less time trying to show everyone how far ahead of them you are.
No kidding... sometimes the moderators baffle me.
I think I speak for everybody here when I say that if you didn't get the reference then this isn't the website for you.
The argument is irrelevant anyway, because the line is:
"A five-ounce bird could not carry a one-pound coconut."