John Tierney of the Times writes:

I went to Garth Sundem, the wickedly ingenious author of Geek Logik, a new book of mathematical formulas for deciding questions like whether you should sleep with a co-worker, whether you should join a gym or see a therapist, and whether you can wear a Speedo without frightening small children.

I asked Sundem to set his sights even higher. The result of our labors (well, mostly his labors, but I want a piece of this scientific breakthrough) is the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory, an equation for predicting the odds that a celebrity marriage will last.

By comparing the many failed marriages with the few successes (like Johnny Cash and June Carter, or Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), Sundem identified telltale factors likes celebrities’ ages, marital track records and levels of fame.

Younger couples have worse prospects than older couples do, particularly if they rush to the altar before getting to know each other. Britney Spears and Kevin Federline have only a 1 percent chance of making it to their fifth anniversary, according to our equation, and the most famously impetuous young couple of all, Romeo and Juliet, would have had zero chance of lasting five years.

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A team of scientists led by Rudy Schild at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have kicked other countries in the crotch by wrecking the notion of black holes everywhere. Dr. Schild’s team suggest in The Astronomical Journal that a quasar they observed is powered by a dense ball of plasma called a MECO (magnetospheric eternally collapsing object)and, since black holes have no magnetic field, black holes would therefore cease to perhaps exist.

Governments in Europe immediately rallied to the defense of black holes. It is estimated that authors in at least 15 other countries were working on novels whose scientific premises were based on the existence of black holes and that those science-fiction novels would be in jeopardy if black holes were no longer possible. Other experts contend that if black holes are found to no longer maybe exist, those authors could make emergency revisions and fall back on string theory to satisfy their bullsh*t science quotas.

Sure, it’s fine if foreign authors lose some writing time but what impact will this research have on the US science fiction industry?

If the US no longer has black holes:

1) Card Walker’s family can stop taking grief about his greenlighting the movie that almost ran Disney out of business. His heirs can now say ‘if the physics was bad, how could the movie be good’?

2) Smug scientist Kip Thorne will have to stop milking his design for Carl Sagan’s Contact to get free beer at college rathskellars.

3) Stephen Hawking will have to make a Fifth Law: we suggest, Oops, those first four were wrong.

Scientists outside the US are almost certain to fight in a way their armies cannot. Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge University’s Institute for Astronomy said the theory was “almost certainly wrong” and had yet to convince most scientists.

Those are fightin’ words, for scientists. Still, the most scathing indictment by a a scientist ever came from Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize Winner for 1945 and the guy who helped obliterate Japan in a nuclear holocaust, when he said about a colleague’s paper, “This isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong.”

Less well known is his quote about Rita Hayworth that same year, “That is oh so right”:

Nothing drives me crazier than bad science which gets published in big forums as reliable. No, I don’t mean the silliness they publish as science on ScienceBlogs.com. I mean actual science, only badly done, and this one published in a news service.

This German study says redheads get the most sex, not blondes. Now, common sense tells you this isn’t true because, as all scientists know, blondes rule.

Heck, my awareness of this fact is so keen I have developed some sort of allergy and/or eye affliction that prevents me from even seeing brunettes.*

But let’s not use me as an example, let’s approach this scientifically.

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James Cameron, who wanted us to suspend disbelief long enough to buy into robots from the future and aliens in our oceans, is worried people might actually have belief in something he didn’t create through the magic of film; specifically that the Old Testament God ( not the ‘be nice to each other’ New Testament one ) was willing to whack some Egyptians when the Jews left there 3000 years ago. I don’t know why that’s so outrageous … Mel Gibson was willing to whack some Jews last week and look what God did to him - yeah, that’s right, Disney is now shopping his movie about Aztecs. Or Mayans. Or Incans. Whatever.

To back up his theory, Cameron invents a chain of events so bizarre and unlikely … well, if you can believe the stuff Cameron theorizes, I should be able to convince you the friggin’ Easter Bunny heaped 10 plagues on that Pharoah guy.

Now maybe there is truth to it and some volcanoes in Greece caused the water to part and magically un-part once the bad guys were stuck in the mud. Cameron has no insight as to why such a fortuitous coincidence happened at just the right moment and neither do I. All I can say about that is, when I was a kid and I got a birthday cake and I asked where it came from, my mother told me she made it. When I got older I discovered the cake was really made of flour and some water and an egg. This newfound knowledge of the composition of the cake did not invalidate the existence of my mother.

Maybe James Cameron will go back to making movies some day but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Until then, get ready to go see Crank. Because it has Jason Statham, who is a legitimately good action hero? Of course not … is the name of this site “Science And Legitimately Good Action Heroes?” No, it is “Science And Supermodels” and that means you should go see it because it has Amy Smart in her underwear.

She can’t part the Red Sea but scientists definitely detect some movement when we look at her. Magically, Amy Smart just happens to be 30 this year. Her ability to make pie crusts is unknown at this time.

James Cameron is worried you might believe in a diety moving some water. I am worried that we can’t even define what a magnetic field is yet a guy in Holland will charge you $1.5 million for a bed that floats on one. James Cameron remains strangely silent on this issue. That, my friends, is the power of belief.

So anyway, back to the title of our post … if James Cameron didn’t part the Red Sea and God didn’t do it, how does science explain it? Easy. My mother did it. Thanks mom.

This study says obesity harms more women than men while this study says hungry men like fat women.

Do I need to spell that out for you? No, it isn’t that hungry men like to eat fat women, it’s that hungry men know fat women have food in the house.

Claire Forlani, on the other hand, isn’t worried about being too thin or not having a man, she lays awake at night worrying about water. She says there isn’t enough of it and she can’t sleep because she thinks about it too much. Says Claire, “I have this daily moment of imagining life without water and it terrifies me.”

I am with you, Claire. I lay awake terrified about a world without actresses saying dumb things. Then I wouldn’t have anything funny to write about.

Al Gore, on the other hand, thinks more water would be bad so he is against global warming that would melt any ice. Scientists that are employed outside government or schools and thus have to work for a living don’t really like what Al Gore is doing with science. If Al Gore had been tribal leader 3,000 years ago and the tribe got big and we started running out of animals to hunt, Al Gore would have said we need to hunt fewer animals.

Scientists would have said we should grow our own livestock and forget hunting. Then every hungry man could find the fat woman of his dreams and we wouldn’t need politicians. Thus, scientists don’t believe that smarmy know-it-alls flying fuel-guzzling jets all over the world to tell us we should be riding bicycles is a good thing.

Not all women lie awake at night thinking about Al Gore in a fur loincloth circa 1000 BC or Claire Forlani’s water issues - some think about other things. Carnie Wilson lies awake at night thinking about donuts. But they don’t make her afraid, they make her horny.

We already answered why hungry men like obese women and I think Carnie Wilson answers how obesity harms women more than men. If Carnie Wilson keeps thinking about those donuts, she will never date a scientist. We refuse to rank second to pastries on the horniness scale.