There is a good reason Americans stink at chess - our unfailing optimism. No matter how bad things get with the economy or the environment or (insert your pet cause here) Americans will always believe that, because we have Jessica Alba, we beat the pants off of everyone else. Russians, for example, don’t think that way. Half of Moscow is populated by women hotter than Jessica Alba and they’re all on a Russian dating site hoping to meet an American mechanic who will get them a green card and raise their kid.

Scientists, American or otherwise, are not afflicted by that kind of sunny disposition. People have a perception that science is a happy wonderland where you come up with an idea and everyone rallies around you and supports you while you try to prove it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Science is done by falsification.
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I was puttering around the attic of the Cashominium, trying to sort through some old boxes, and I came across something you all might find interesting. Before any of this makes sense, I need to give you a little family background.

Like many, the Cash family has been here a long time (a long time for America, anyway - here a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance, so it’s all perspective) but we are not blueblooded fancy-pants Mayflower descendants or anything like that. We arrived just over 160 years ago. The mid-1800s were a popular time to leave Europe, what with land and opportunity here and there being the place where guys like Napoleon were still fashionable and ‘reform’ meant killing a lot of people, but we weren’t the working poor that left because of lousy potato crops or anything so dire.

More predictably, legend has it that old Jebediah left Britain under some questionable circumstances - namely a scandal involving a woman.

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Esquire magazine scribe Tom Junod recently wrote something that made me question my judgment and his sanity - namely that Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology.

Now, the last time someone compared themselves to Isaac Newton it was … well, okay it was me, but even I can’t be serious about comparing myself to Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is a serious guy in physics. A giant. Maybe the giant. It’s one thing to make comparisons for dramatic effect, which a keen writer like Junod can do better than anyone, but another to make a serious case.

Isaac Newton is the metric for comparison because he is so fundamental. Isaac Newton to physicists is like a Prius is to environmental activists. He’s that important. So it would be easy to dismiss Junod out of hand because, let’s face it, he knows jack about science. But dismissing things out of hand is not what science is about so, instead, we will do what scientists always do when faced with a hypothesis.

Make a bunch of tables.

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According to this article, researchers at the World Health Organization have claimed that the last natural blonde will be born in Finland in 2202. And the BBC version tells us German scientists have claimed this is due to decreasing frequency of the recessive gene for blonde hair.

The SkyNet article states that when the last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago blonde hair and blue eyes were developed as a competitive advantage in getting a caveman. That’s right, with men in short supply some girls had to use manipulation in order to get one of us - and even then blondes were known to be more fun.

The Germans say the problem is racial mixing - yes, Germans speaking out against racial mixing. Whoda thunk it?

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Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

So we can’t just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let’s deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou’s research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there’s one thing I know, it’s vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to state unequivocally that vampires don’t always create more vampires. They only create vampires out of people they really like, or who have waistlines like Vampira:

Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton.

Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet, it was clarified that vampires wouldn’t feed themselves to extinction any more than we would keep on killing buffalo until they were almost gone.

This was on TV, people. If you can’t believe what you see on TV, I can’t reason with you.

Professor Efthimiou’s simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can’t hurt to have a vampire slayer handy.

Everyone goes for Buffy. I’d rather have a little Faith.