How to solve the rhino horn saga

It being Rhino Day and all...

You think you are living in a modern world, a world where people are finally beginning to understand the way things work. Using science, logic and technological advances to solve problems is the norm.

No it isn't.

Some crazy backward bastards go and ruin everything by believing that a rhinos horn has medicinal value! According to 16th century pharmacists (yes, 16th century!!!) the magical horn is said to treat fever, rheumatism, gout, snake bites, hallucinations, typhoid, headaches, carbuncles, vomiting, food poisoning, libido, being possessed by the devil... but rhino horn does none of these things. These people may as well treat their condition by eating their own hair and nail clippings. Heck they may as well drink a glass of water, it's far more useful medicinally.

Thereafter, a group of even crazier money hungry sods go and harvest horns from live animals to meet the demand. A win win situation? I think not! Armed with aforementioned technological advances, poachers have become devastatingly efficient at harvesting horns. Rhino numbers are declining and so on and so forth...

THE SOLUTION

Okay it's pretty easy and I can't imagine why it hasn't been tried yet. You see the horn has tremendous value, it must have if poachers are able to form well organised armed teams in helicopters (!!!) to harvest a few (dozen maybe) horns a month at the most. Horns are also very scarce which drives their value up, this is logical. So what if...(let me put this into perspective)... what if authorities were to flood the market with fake rhino horn. If it is traditionally dispensed in a powder form simply drown the black market in fake product (it'll be just as effective, medicinally, as the real stuff).

1. Brainless customers will be happy because they could get their product cheaply.
   
2. Poachers would stop hacking rhinos to bits because selling chickens wings on the black market would be far more profitable
3. Rhino extinction probabilities would be reduced significantly
4. Hippies would stop their endless moaning on the subject (they'd find something else but we can be happy in between complaints)
   

That's just stupid! These people are idiots!

I have the ‘How to…?’ page enabled on iGoogle. It basically puts up 3 random ‘how to’ questions and if you are interested you click the link and learn something new (hopefully)… you get the picture.

I would estimate that 30% of the ‘how to’ topics are worth reading, 69% are pretty uninspiring and 1% are utter trash. Today for example, one of the topics was ‘How to win an eating contest?’

I can answer that in three words “Eat the most.” So I was curious to see if there really was more…

This is the unaltered first paragraph of the article (with my personal views in brackets):

Be in good physical and mental shape. It is important to ensure that you're healthy and fit before trying an eating contest (Being a lard ass will probably also help…). Consult your physician before the contest and get their advice (they will advise you NOT to enter a stupid eating contest…). Make sure that you aren't on medication that shouldn't be taken with food (wow… someone actually did that!). Check with contest officials that EMTs and an ambulance will be present in the event of choking or allergic reactions (because you thought it would be a good idea to shove 70 hotdogs into a space designed to fit 2 hot dogs… and still somehow forgot that you were allergic to hotdogs!!!???), or third-degree burns on the roof of your mouth from searing hot taco beef (Contestant>>>“Hi honey I’m home, sorry I can’t kiss you today, I have third degree burns on my palate from eating too much searing hot taco beef”… “no, I did it on purpose, I thought that because they had a medical team and ambulance on site I would be immune to the effects of scoffing 180degC food. Boy was I wrong.” Spouse>>>”I want a divorce”).

I think we can safely file this ‘how to?’ topic under the ‘utter trash’ category. Anyone with half a brain would know that eating contests are stupid and people that enter them are stupider. It just gets worse and worse. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, so I read on (Does this happen to anyone else?) only to find out that people interested in eating competitions can join the MLE (Major League Eating) or the AICE (Association of Independent Competitive Eaters). They’re turning eating into a sport!

Sigh…

The quest for flawless science

As a junior scientist studying living organisms I am constantly in pursuit of the holy grail of our field.

A perfect study!

The one where you’ve considered all the factors, taken every precaution, sifted out all the nonsense and analyzed every ounce of information from your precious data. All of your hard work and effort pay off after you handed in that manuscript and it returned just as clean. Finding out that your best effort was not good enough is quite possibly the scariest thing that can happen to our kind. We’d sooner give up entirely and become bartenders in the UK (or pack fish in Alaska…that’s quite a popular one) than continue down a path where we were certain we’d be dishonoured.

Why all the talk of uncertainty you ask? Well today I read through some old text books and realised something. It seemed little at the time but after some thought the significance of what I had come to realise seemed quite epic. In my pursuit of perfection I had forgotten about one of our most sacred rules in biology.

Don’t be an idiot!

Let me explain. I started thinking about how flawed my motives and study could potentially be after reading this sentence “If one attempted to study adaptation simply by measuring survival and reproductive success, one would reach the vacuous conclusion that those that survive and reproduce are those that survive and reproduce” (Scriven, 1959). GASP! I was so obsessed about eliminating external factors to find out about sugar preferences in avian frugivores that I had inadvertently shot myself in the foot. My theoretical approach to the question I had asked had focused solely on isolating and studying a single factor. It would have been more appropriate for me to try mimicking my test subject’s natural environment to learn something more useful and applicable to the real world. Now (3 years on) all I can do is predict vague trends, much too shallow and universally applicable to actually be meaningful and contribute significantly to my field of study.

Oh, FishSTicks!