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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)."
A 54-year survey of 26,285 European Swallows captured and released by the Avian Demography Unit of the University of Capetown finds that the average adult European swallow has a wing length of 12.2 cm and a body mass of 20.3 grams.
54 years? That's amazing, i think I could copy that research with a shotgun, a measuring tool and a free sunday afternoon.
Yes, finally someone had the balls to answer this question that has been wracking the minds of scientists for ages!
Someone get this man a nobel.
just so you know
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.
But what is your favourite colour?
For his next article, can he tell us if the parrot is dead?
That's what my University tutor used to say about the exams :(
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.
The site has now been mirrored by karma whores on numerous different hosts at great expense and at the last minute.