Friday, May 28, 2010

Even Biology Can Be Fun!

**Hello, Dr. El-Rady's Students. Thanks for visiting to see my take on your homework questions!**

This is one of my homework questions for the Biology of Humans, and my answer:

4)The parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster uses a very interesting correlation between pirates and natural disasters:
“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”

Can the scientific method be used to prove or disprove this pirate/disaster correlation? How would this be done? (6 points)

Yes, it can be disproven.

The way to do this would be to track other things that can relate to shrinking pirate numbers since the 1800’s. For instance, other modes of transport have been invented and used , such as trains, automobiles and airplanes. As a result, travel via boats and ships, especially over long distances, has become a novelty.

We observe that there are less pirates today than there were 200 years ago. Then, we question “Why are there less pirates?” I hypothesize that the decrease in pirates is due to the increase in other modes of transportation. Then, we might predict that the more cars, trains and airplanes we use, the less boats and ships are used, which provide less opportunities for piracy.

Then, we would conduct research by logging car registrations, number of trains and planes in operation and ships register by ten year intervals. I would then log the number of each on a graph.

In addition, we can correlate the increase in global warming to the proliferation of the increase in these other modes of travel, all of which use fossil fuels which warm the environment. At the same time, we can track the global temperature on that same chart to show that it is increasing in proportion to the growing number of transport devices that emit pollutants that contribute to global warming, as opposed to ships that relied on the wind for locomotion.

Finally, less ships traveling the world’s waterways makes piracy a less lucrative livelihood, and those formerly interested in piracy as a profession become multi-level marketing executives and officers of Enron instead.
The question makes me wonder about Pastafarians, though. Do they eat pasta? Honestly, wouldn't it be bad to eat your diety?

***1/18/11 I seem to be getting a lot of searches out of USF for this question lately!! This was my SUBMITTED ANSWER to the question for the class. I posted this because I found Dr. El-Rady's question humorous. Be aware that my answer was submitted via Safe Assign... ***

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