Thursday, December 18, 2008

More Groundbreaking Study in Sweden

Sweden has a habit of making ground breaking discoveries in different areas of sciences. The pacemaker, dynamite, Skype. They do good work.

With these groundbreaking studies come some, well, less than groundbreaking studies. Like studies about breast size and cancer. Or the sagginess of Swedish boobs. All, I’m sure, very important in the little world of that particular researcher, but in the grand scheme of things, not Nobel Prize worthy. But sometimes a study comes out that takes the world by storm. A study that shakes the world to its very core.

And it is in this vein that a new study flows. And it has to do with the flow of alcohol and the munchies. Clearly, Nobel Prize-worthy work. At least if you ask college students who have shelled out money at 3 in the morning trying to get a little food inside of them after a night of drinking.

Most people, after a few drinks, tend to get a bit hungry. Maybe it’s time for some delicious chilinötter (my spell check suggested chilinötter be chili otter, which is close to chili nuts) at the bar or a kebab on the walk home. It satisfies that empty hollow in your gut. Plus it mixes well with all the booze.

Of course, knowing that many people have this problem, a Swedish researcher has set out to find out why. The eternal question. The answer to this question could have far reaching consequences. Perhaps the infamous freshman fifteen will drop a bit as college freshman learn to control their munchies after drinking. Knowledge is power you know.

Anyway, the study was a simple one. Give a bunch of people alcohol and measure their hunger. Give a bunch of people water and measure their hunger. Record the data. Compare.

Turns out though, that the hypothesis of the scientist was proven wrong by the data. Which, to be perfectly honest, I quite like to hear. Not because I like to see other people failure, but because I think you can find a lot of good in the failure of scientific experiments. Having been inundated with a lot of science over the last couple of years, more than I could have ever expected, I have also come to appreciate the different aspects of scientific studies. Like all the studies that fail. But never get published or discussed because they failed. But there is gain to be found in those failures. Even when they only focus on drinking and hunger.

As a side note, the scientist doing the study is a guy. And this is his doctoral dissertation. Which for some reason just didn’t surprise me at all.

Welcome to Sweden. Home of the Nobel Prize. And amazing scholarly research.

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8 comments:

  1. At 3 AM, dinner was many hours ago, so it's not exactly surprising that one is a bit hungry after that.

    Some research tends to confirm the obvious, but that doesn't mean it is completely worthless.
    We have one more proven or disproven hypothesis.

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  2. When people are drunk they don´t care if they eat bad food. They eat the food they like, not the food they are supose to like. They can like the food they are supose to like when they are sober=)=)

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  3. A late evening, slightly racist, comment (not hungry, though): Is this really an American, using this sophisticated language?

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  4. Ofcourse not! All Americans are just plain stupid. Everyone knows that!
    I mean, it's not like they were the one that created the Internet and explored the moon or anything like that.

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  5. well, they did'nt create the internet and the moon isn't explored in any greater sense of the word so, you are probably correct.

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  6. i'm wondering what Americans being stupid has to do with anything in this post?
    or did you just feel the need to be insulting?

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  7. JohnBoy- bunch of Americans worked on the internet - no Swedes as far as I can tell. Americans - no Swedes - landed on the moon several times - whether your tight butted definition of "explored" works or not is up to you... humorless putz.
    ________________________________

    The Internet was originally developed by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as a means to share information on defense research between involved universities and defense research facilities. Originally it was just email and FTP sites as well as the Usenet where scientists could question and answer each other. It was originally called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork). The concept was developed starting in 1964, and the first messages passed were between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in 1969. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT had published the first paper on packet switching theory in 1961. Since networking computers was new to begin with, standards were being developed on the fly. Once the concept was proven, the organizations involved started to lay out some ground rules for standardization.

    One of the most important was the communications protocol, TCP/IP, developed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974. Robert Metcalfe is credited with Ethernet which is the basic communication standard in networked computers.

    Tim Berners-Lee perhaps specified technological applicability and / or linguistic construction of HTML while working at CERN, is chiefly credited for the ease of use and wide public adoption of the web. Here is his website: w3.org

    Al Gore really did have a substantial part in the US legal framework and governmental issues related to the internet He never said he invented it.

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  8. @eklandisk – agreed. It seems like 3 am is a good time to eat if you haven’t eaten since dinner.

    @Aila – oooh, I like it.

    @Bengt – sophisticated language is a mere bagatelle. See what I did there?

    @anonymous – every single one of them. The whole lot.

    @john – technicalities.

    @anonymous – some people are just mean.

    @anonymous – good work on the internet definition.

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