Posted on 05/13/2008 12:49:18 PM PDT by Squawk 8888
Where are the damn car keys?
The socks? The left sneaker, when only the right one remains where you last pulled them off?
In the greater universe of smaller things, some objects seem to have a mind, and get-away plan, all their own.
Explaining it away as aging grey matter, just one of those days or mind games played by the dog, most of us just blindly move forward — always keeping an eye out for our much loved but still missing bric-a-brac.
But what if science could open a door into this lost world? What if the brightest men and women — with lab coats, analytical minds and time on their hands — could qualify and quantify the smallest, universal nuisance?
Then you would have a case study in missing teaspoons — as well as a lesson on the universal need for levity in the face of a petty nuisance.
Australia's largest infectious disease research facility — the Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Research and the Macfarlane Burnet Institute in Melbourne — moved to a new building a few years ago. That's when veteran researcher Dr. Campbell Aitken and his brainy staff began to scratch their heads over the persistent loss of silverware in the eight tearooms in the complex.
Research assistant Megan Lim would go out and buy more only to have them vanish again.
"We were bitching about this, when we wondered if there wasn't some way of figuring out where they went," recalls Aitken, whose team usually studies the patterns of infectious diseases, including blood-born viruses.
On the line from his Australian home, he adds: "It started as a joke, but took off from there."
What it became was the "longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute."
They were looking for a way to use the tools of their trade to measure the phenomenon of the flights of fancy of silver spoons.
"Lacking any guidance from previous researchers, we set out to answer the age old question, 'Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?'" the paper reads.
Throughout the 140-person complex, Aitken and his team put out 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons and kept careful track of them.
A five-month pilot study was conducted using 32 plain stainless steel teaspoons — all numbered with nail polish.
A main study followed, using a further 54 cheap spoons, along with 16 of much higher quality. For months, their lives were quietly charted and tracked.
In the jargon of researchers, they "observed the teaspoons for a total of 5,668 teaspoon days."
Graphs were created. Models produced. Numbers crunched.
What surprised Aitken, was that by the end they had hard data — even though the conclusions of where the spoons went remain rather flighty.
They found that 80% of the teaspoons vanished during the study. They figured out the half-life of the teaspoons was 81 days, that those left in communal break-rooms was shorter than in private lab areas, that it didn't matter whether the silverware was expensive or cheap and that an estimated 250 spoons would need to be purchased each year to have a constant supply of 70 teaspoons.
"The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened," the study found.
Aitken and his spoon squad calculated that an estimated 18 million teaspoons go missing in the city of Melbourne each year, and if they were laid end to end, they would run 2,700 km. They would also weigh 360 metric tons, which is equal to the heft of four adult blue whales.
After staff were told of the secret research project — done under their noses — only five missing teaspoons were recovered.
Looking back through history, Aitken couldn't find any previous studies ever done on missing spoons. But his team managed to link the phenomenon to the destruction of open grazing lands. That, when left for anyone to use, ranchers will each take a little more than they should, leaving the commons overgrazed and useless to everyone.
There is also the theory of resistentialism — that objects are in a constant war against their human handlers.
But the researchers proposed an even more speculative theory — that somewhere in the expanse of the cosmos, beyond the stirrings of the Milky Way, there is a home-world to spoons.
"Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life," the paper suggested.
But they leave behind dysfunctional offices where forks, knives and staplers are used to measure our sugar and instant coffee, Aitken concluded.
The team called on fellow research facilities to — as a top priority — develop better methods of stopping the world-wide vanishing of the spoons.
Though unknown by most people who stir their coffee or tea, Aitken's research into the secret lives of utensils has found an academic life beyond down-under tea cup rattlings. The prestigious British Medical Journal mentioned the study two years ago, and the final data is now used in Africa and in schools in the U.S., as a teaching tool on how to conduct a research project.
And the teaspoons at the institute? Have they finally learned to stay put?
No, says the head researcher on the project. They still go missing at an alarming rate.
But not the last spoon among the many test subjects.
There is now only that single original left. So the team has now framed it.
"It remains," says Aitken, "hung on our tearoom wall."
Where did all the spoons go?
I want answers about that and why I have more Tupperware lids than bowls.
They all go into an alternate universe, everyone knows that. If you can’t find that left(or right)sock it is because someone in another dimension needed it! I am only half joking because we all know that socks do go missing in a washing machine that should show the socks but there it is, gone. As for spoons, well wouldn’t you need spoons in another dimension?
He ended up discovering the theory and practical application of teleporting things and people, a la Star Trek.
It could happen...
That is hillarious.
Wish I had thought of it first.
“’Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?’”
They’ve all gone gay. They now wish to be called “Sporks,” or “Runcibles.”
http://www.spork.org/
No, they don't go missing. Socks mate in the washer and give birth in the dryer.
How else could you explain that oddball sock that shows up every once in a while when you just know you've never bought any like that?
If the spoons are valuable, check Hillary’s silverware drawer.
I just want to know if they broke the $3 million mark funding this study. Until then, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
They could have just put in metal detectors.
Check my daughter's bedroom. I'm sure they're all there.
Sporkweasel stole them.
“Aitken and his spoon squad calculated that an estimated 18 million teaspoons go missing in the city of Melbourne each year,...”
No way that everybody in Melbourne could be as dishonest and sloppy as a bunch of pointy-headed nerds with no real work to do.
Left or right sock?
Are you serious?
This is a true story: a good friend of my wife was separated from her husband and staying at her brother’s house; after about a month and a half of doing his laundry, her own and the two boys the washer died.
Her brother who had no mechanical skills or interest in fiddling with such things bought a new washer and we ended up with the broken one.
Just for the heck of it, I figured out the pump wasn’t working so I took it apart and started looking at it.
I couldn’t turn the coupling by hand so I took out the plate screws and opened it up expecting to find a broken gear.
There inside the machine was a tangled up piece of tan Nylon - my wife’s friend had washed her pantyhose and that machine ate them.
Scout’s Honor!
After being "lost" they migrate to a dark corner of your closet where they later emerge in their adult state as ---
flimsy wire hangers.
Obviously you have no sense of humor.
I have a place for odd ball socks. Only after enough time has passed(I’m not sure how I determine that), I throw out the ones I’ve given up on. Only to have the mate show up in the next week’s laundry. And that doesn’t even take into account that I have a dog with a sock fetish and it is not unusual, if we have a particularly large amt of odds, to look under the bed and find 6 or 8 socks she has ‘collected’. But that must be done when she is outside because she is sensitive to someone going into her private stash in her presence.
One would expect that they kept the study secret from the rest of the staff, in order to prevent the appropriation of spoons just to make the researchers scratch their heads.
They need to realize that spoons, like socks, are highly anti-anthromorphic, and really hate being used by humans. They will use any means possible to high-tail it to parts unknown the first chance they get.
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