Sex, lies and scientific papers
COULD a spaghetti western be scientists’ favourite movie? Reto Schneider believes it is and reckons he can prove it. Writing in his blog at , he points out that: “No other movie title pops up more often in the heading of a scientific paper than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Schneider’s searches on Google Scholar reveal that the name of Sergio Leone’s film, or variations thereof, occurs in the titles of no less than 2710 papers, an example being “The Good, the Bad, and the Cell Type-Specific Roles of Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1 in Neurons and Astrocytes” (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 28, p 1988).
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Another film that scientists clearly enjoy is Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape. Schneider found this features in 526 paper titles, such as “Sex, Lies, and Herbicides” (Nature Biotechnology, vol 18, p 241).
Third most popular is Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). Schneider found this cropping up in 513 papers, not least of which was “Everything you always wanted to know about Amorphophallus, but were afraid to stick your nose into!” (Aroideana, vol 19, p 7).
Other films among Schneider’s top 10 are Some Like It Hot (512 paper titles), Dances With Wolves (454) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (424). You can see the full list, with examples of titles based on them, at .
Large numbers of pizza toppings
CAN it be true, we asked on 8 January, that Domino’s Pizza offers “more than 1.8 billion pizza combinations”? That was the claim presented to Sian Cole in from Domino Australia for a pizza-ordering iPhone app.
“Obviously it can” was the gist of the responses from a score of readers. Start at the top of the menu of toppings. You can have, or not have, the first one, which gives you two “combinations”. And the same for the second one, making four combinations, now. In general, for n choices, there are 2ncombinations and 230 is 1,073,741,824 – less than 1.8 billion – whereas 231 is 2,147,483,648. So it seems clear that many of our readers were right in saying you need at least 31 toppings on the menu to make 1.8 billion.
We checked at Domino Australia’s , hoping it would offer the same choice. It encouraged us to choose from 34 toppings. Fine – but in that case, we wondered, why didn’t they claim 234, or 17 billion combinations, rather than 1.8 billion?
But it’s not as easy as that. To check our counting, we started ordering a pizza with everything – and encountered this message: “A maximum of 11 topping serves allowed on each pizza or pizza half.” We resorted to asking an spreadsheet how many ways there are of picking 11 from 34, and it gave us an answer of 286,097,760. But if that applies to just one half of our pizza, and the same number also applies to the other half, the total of possible whole pizzas is that number multiplied by itself, which is 81,851,928,277,017,500 combinations in total – about 82 million billion.
That’s plenty, but it leaves out the additional possible combinations provided by people choosing fewer than 11 toppings. What’s more, all this assumes that you are only allowed to have a single serving of each topping per half pizza. Donald Hobson (aged 12) raises the possibilities of variable quantities of topping. We asked the online ordering service. “Maximum of 3 serves of any single topping allowed on each pizza or pizza half,” it told us as we ordered treble anchovy.
Feedback’s knowledge of is exhausted. Are there readers who understand whether or not “” is relevant here, or who can in any way explain how the advert’s writers got to the figure of 1.8 billion?
Our head hurts – we’re going out for a nice curry.
DOES your company have a mission statement? If so, how does it compare with this: “Our objective is to empower back-end recognition with bedded down systems for the benefit of our clients and other interested parties.”
Impressive, don’t you think? If you wish your company could state its own deeply held values so clearly, rejoice, for help is at hand. Just go to the mission statement generator at , which provided us with this fine example. There are many more where it came from.
READER Tyler Lord was shocked to see a sign outside a shop in Calgary, Canada, offering “Toshiba – all paradigm on sale”. Is this simply an example of an uncertain grasp of the English language, or is it the ultimate sell-out for the philosophy of science?
FINALLY, the on the Pricerunner website told Peter Whittaker that the Alba PCD730 personal CD player ranges in price from “£9.99 – £9.99” and that its weight is “320486 lbs”. Peter was interested in the price (which has since gone up), but thought he would have difficulty carrying the player around.