September 1999 Vol. 220 No. 9  Editorial

Thomas R. Wright, Jr.,  Editorial Director

Bad science and other goofs

Maybe it comes with the summer heat, but lately there seems to be an abundance of reports citing questionable environmental science, absurd governmental projects and plain old bureaucratic ineptitude. The silliest example has to be the conclusion of Alexander Lerchi, a German medical researcher, who thinks that "global warming" will cause the ratio of male-to-female births to increase in favor of the boys.

What Herr Lerchi did was to graph births in Germany, by sex, between the years 1946 and 1995. He then calculated the average temperature at the babies’ probable times of conception. He apparently found that sudden warm spells in the middle of winter produced an abundance of boy births some nine months later. Subsequently, Herr Lerchi concluded that the Y chromosome, which determines the male sex, is better able to resist heat than the X chromosome, which determines the female sex. Stretching his theory to the ultimate limit, he then predicts that "global warming" could change the birth ratio by a couple of percentage points in favor of boys.

The inescapable corollary to the above hypothesis, then, would seem to say that births in places such as the Middle East and some equatorial locales would have to be 80-90% male. We don’t think so.

Our candidate for the award for governmental absurdity is the U.S. Interior Department’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), which conceived and runs the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (BANWR).

BANWR is in southern Arizona, along the border with Mexico, and was originally established to restore the masked bobwhite quail. And according to The Torch, the newsletter of the Society for Environmental Truth, costs for this government boondoggle have now reached $111.5 million.

Since the quail were totally absent from the refuge, it was necessary to bring them in, and later, breed them onsite. Of the 35,248 quail bred or transferred to the refuge through 1996, 20,557 reached release size. (Incidentally, survival rates for birds raised on the refuge until release were only 10.4%, compared to 79% for those raised offsite.) Survival rates after release were even worse — the last independent survey conducted in 1998 found only 51 masked bobwhite quail on the entire refuge. Thus, the cost per surviving bird is somewhere around $2,185,850. That’s a fowl price for less than 1/2-lb of poultry.

Finally, the dumb bureaucrat medal should go to the U.S. Postal Service employee who designed a new stamp commemorating the Grand Canyon — moving it out of Arizona. It seems that 100 million of the 60-cent international stamps were printed with a picture of the canyon over the words, "Grand Canyon, Colorado."

But it gets worse — Postal spokesman Don Smeraldi was quoted as saying that the agency is in discussions with the printer to determine whether the stamps need to be reprinted.

Why NZ is a good place to work. In a recent e-mail, drilling consultant Scott McNeil told us about having the good fortune to pick up a job in New Zealand, after working in developing countries for several years. He says the Kiwis had a hard time figuring out why he walked around with a permanent grin, so he wrote the following to try to tell them what they were missing (Editor’s note: We admit some editing for political correctness):

• You don’t burn down embassies on theological grounds.
• Setting fire to your wife is not an acceptable form of divorce.
• I didn’t have to bribe somebody to let me into the country.
• If the NZ cricket team wins, I won’t have to take cover from falling bullets during the celebration.
• You don’t stone overly-frisky neighbors.
• Nobody is recording my telephone conversations.
• Six is a bit young to get married.
• You don’t have camel spiders.
• Airline pilots got their jobs through skill and intelligence, not by who their father knew.
• Wives are not bought.
• When the NZ cricket team plays, the security guards do not outnumber the spectators, nor are they armed with riot guns, tear gas or lati sticks.
• Six is regarded as five too many wives.
• You definitely don’t have camel spiders.
• Even in mid-summer, temperatures won’t get near 115ºF.
• Members of Parliament are elected by ballot, not because they have more weaponry than anyone else in the district.
• My mail arrives unopened the same month it was sent.
• I don’t need an 8-ft wall around my house, nor do I need armed guards.
• If I go out with a local girl, her male relatives won’t kidnap me and remove a vital part of my anatomy.
• You can openly buy alcohol, and a case of beer does not cost $110.
• You speak English — well, sort of ...
• A 13-year-old boy is unlikely to get an AK-47 as a birthday present.
• Six is a bit young to start work.
• When shopping, I don’t have to spend 20 min negotiating, nor did the price increase 300% when I entered.
• The entire annual rainfall does not come in one six-week period.
• You don’t have scorpions.
• You really, really, don’t have camel spiders.
• I am relatively sure that airplane passengers have not brought guns, hand grenades, goats, chickens or butane gas stoves on board.
• If a driver, high on drugs on the wrong side of the road hits my car, it’s pretty sure that he would be the one thrown in jail.

We’ve never encountered a camel spider, and from what Scott has to say, we don’t want to either.

For engineers only. In another recent e-mail, we learned why engineers and scientists never earn as much as executives and sales people. It seems that two postulates have been discovered, which can be written into a mathematical equation to explain the above phenomenon. Here’s the derivation:

Therefore; as knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work performed. This produces the Theorem:

The less you know, the more you make.

Copyright © 1999 World Oil
Copyright © 1999 Gulf Publishing Company