September 26, 2002

A Preposterous Universe?

Man, Dave Barry has it so easy. All he has to do is open a newspaper and Voila! Column material - all over the place... My guess is he writes about 25 columns a day in his head and has a hard time picking which one to publish. And its not just because the world is a funny place - it is! But he gets more than his share of help from headline writers. Maybe Mr. Barry should move on up to Virginia. Here are a couple of recent examples from the Roanoke Times:

"Less Fat Grams and More Exercise Helpful."

"Fox Hunting Doesn't Reduce Their Numbers, Study Says."

"Space's Mysteries Prove More Dense Than Even Scientists Can Handle."

I had a hard time picking which "weight loss" headline to use. My second favorite this week was: "Report: Many Weight Loss Ads Misleading." Well raise my rent. And you mean to tell me that, "Less fat grams and more exercise are helpful" as well? Kind of takes the "News" out of "Newspaper" doesn't it? Now I know why my Grandfather simply called it "the paper" and said that most of its "secondary uses," such as lining cat boxes and bird cages, were among its best ones.

But neither "health headline" even begins to compete with the title and article on fox hunting. If fox hunting "doesn't reduce their numbers" then one has to ask if anything resembling "hunting" is really occurring at all?

Maybe it should read: "Poor Attempts At Fox Hunting Don't Reduce Their Numbers, Study Says."

Who the heck are these guys?

My guess is that the foxes are not in agreement.

The first line of this fine bit of journalism states that "the results of the study contradict a cherished belief among farmers and fox hunters who say the research is flawed." (The government is trying to ban fox hunting based on the idea that it doesn't help deplete their numbers anyway.)

"Flawed research?"

"Contradicts a cherished belief?"

Is the idea that hunting tends to result in the reduction of some number of a species a "cherished belief?" Or, just a bit of sound reasoning? The word "flawed" seems a little weak in this context. How about "ridiculous" or "comical" or even "preposterous." I'm no anti-fox man, but I think I'm with the farmers and fox-hunters on this one. Just goes to show that if the government wants something badly enough, they'll always be able to find someone willing to prepare an appropriate "study." (This one, by the way was based on a whopping 10 months of research.)

Which takes us to the density of space and some of the scientists that "study" it. (No, that's not a dangling participle...) In this nifty little bit of reasoning entitled, "Space's Mysteries Prove More Dense Than Even Scientists Can Handle," (perhaps they should have dropped the last two words) several leading astrophysicists make a great bunch of hullabaloo over the fact that the Universe is a really, really strange place (i.e. they can't seem to figure it out.)

Citing the fact that "ordinary matter" only accounts for 5 percent of the universe, and that the rest comes from some "mysterious dark matter" that can't be seen or measured, (I wish they would call it "unseen matter"- "dark matter" scares the bejeezy out of me...) these scientists contend that the Universe is racing outward like crazy in all directions. They have arrived at this conclusion by measuring the "polarization of background radiation" in a manner that is not describable with words that will get by a pre-1998 spell checker. Suffice to say it's complex in an MIT kind of way.

And I agree with them. Based on my own rather limited study and the fact that both Michael Jordan and my dog "Goose" can hang in the air for 2 minutes when needed, I think the universe is indeed expanding. And all parents of 3-year-old boys know that any material can become "dark matter" in mere seconds. In fact, I guarantee you that 95 percent of the universe is made of it. I know mine is.

But, what really bothered me about this particular group of scientists was their response to the "bizarre realities" that were supported by their new found evidence and observations. When faced with truths that they "just could not understand," they responded by remarking, "We're stuck with a preposterous Universe."

How completely and utterly "Human!"

"You know, we just aren't sure what the heck is going on... This darn thing is ridiculous... 'flawed' even.... no, downright 'preposterous'... and we're 'stuck' with it! God, get it right next time will ya?!"

Sheesh.

When will these guys understand that if our world is 14 billion years old as they contend, then our study of it over the last couple of thousand years (99 percent of what we know coming in the last 50) makes a ten month study on foxes and its conclusions seem like pretty good science. Relatively speaking we just don't know much. But don't blame yourselves, fellows - I don't think the Big Guy really expects us to.

But I wouldn't be calling his work "preposterous." It's been around a little bit longer than ours.

So have foxes and misleading diet plans.

A preposterous Universe?

If anything, it's stuck with us.