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When analysis goes bad

 
 
Papess
14:41 / 24.09.02
OMG! This is too f-ing funny!


(The story behind this...Apparently, there is a nutball who digs
things out of his back yard and sends his "discoveries" to the
Smithsonian Institution, labelling them with scientific names and
insisting they are actual archaeological finds. The bizarre truth is
that this guy really exists and does this in his spare time! Anyway,
what follows is a letter from the Smithsonian Institution in response
to his submission of a recently discovered specimen.)

====================================================

Paleoanthropology Division
Smithsonian Institution
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labelled
"211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull." We
have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and
regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it
represents "conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in
Charleston County two million years ago." Rather, it appears that
what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one
of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the "Malibu
Barbie." It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to
the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that
those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were
loathe to come to contradiction with your findings.

However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of
the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is moulded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are
typically fossilised bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic
centimetres, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified
proto-hominids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the "skull" is more consistent with
the common domesticated canine (dog) than it is with the "ravenous
man-eating Pliocene clams" you speculate roamed the wetlands during that
time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing
hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution,
but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it.

Without going into too much detail, let us say that:

A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has
chewed on.

B. Clams don't have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your
request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the
heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due
to carbon dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic
record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced
prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly
inaccurate results.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National
Science Foundation's Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning
your specimen the scientific name "Australopithecus spiff-arino."

Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance
of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the
species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn't really sound like
it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating
specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil,
it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of
work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that
our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the
display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the
Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will
happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your
back yard.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation's capital that you
proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the
Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing
you expand on your theories surrounding the "trans-positating
fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix" that makes
the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently
discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm
Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Curator, Antiquities
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:47 / 24.09.02
I've got a feeling we've seen this before and, unfortunately, there's never been a Harvey Rowe at the Smithsonian. Shame.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
14:55 / 24.09.02
Does it matter? It's a cracking piece of writing. There was Henry Root, who used to send cross letters alleging all manner of things in the UK, and his letters were collected. This guy does sound familiar - perhaps just because this has been posted before.
 
 
Papess
14:56 / 24.09.02
I thought it was funny anyway.

I to do a search but I wasn't getting anything that looked like this.

Sorry for the repetition.


~MT
 
 
Smoothly
15:00 / 24.09.02
Thisis just an excuse for me to test my HTMLing.
 
 
Ambicath
15:45 / 24.09.02
If not the first paragraphs, then at least the 'spiff-arino' sorta tipped the joke off.

Fun, though.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:53 / 24.09.02
Does it matter?

In the sense of "does it make it any less amusing?", then no. The fatc that somebody's gone to the bother of finding out if it could be true or not - and returning with a negative answer - spoils it as a piece of 'Net myth. It's a shame, because it'd be nice to believe in it. Same thing applies to the Arthur Blake blogs - once they're finished, the thread dealing with them should be deleted and we should never talk of them again, just to prevent anyone from finding out the truth.
 
 
Baz Auckland
14:13 / 25.09.02
A friend of mine years ago had the best stories about his relatives meeting the Rolling Stones and Bono and finding Elvis's motorcycle.

Some obviously weren't true, but I've always been a firm believer in "It doesn't matter if it's true or not...it's funny!" No one ever agrees...
 
 
Papess
14:31 / 25.09.02

Somewhere, in some parallel universe, this actually happened.

So, my conclusion: Everything is true...or everything is untrue, depending on how you look at it.

But hell, it sure is funny, true or not (in our universe)!

As the abstract says.."have a laugh"
 
 
Smoothly
15:42 / 25.09.02
Sorry to be a bit serious and diverge from the Abstract, but I think this raises an interesting question: What, if anything, has the truth got to do with funny? And more broadly, are there any 'rules' or defining characteristics for jokes.
As Homer Simpson observed, in the case of some comedy 'It's funny cos it's true'. This strikes me as being the case in some comedy (frinstance the observational kind, and satire only works when the thing being lampooned is real). When I first chanced upon the user reviews of David Hasselhoff's albums on Amazon I laughed harder while I was under the impression that they were sincere. And jokes about losing socks in the wash are only jokes because they're grounded in some kind of popular truth.
In the case of the letter from the Smithsonian, it's still amusing to imagine a character digging up rubbish and presenting it as ancient relics, I agree, but wouldn't the story would be even funnier if he really existed? The preface to the letter even emphasises that he 'really exists' in the same way that raconteurs often say '...and this is a true story'. Is this significant or just a blindly followed comedy convention?
On the other hand, when Steven Wright explains that he once saw a man with wooden legs but real feet, the fact that actually he didn't doesn't temper my guffaws.
 
  
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