February 18, 2008

Horse 858 - Vital Scientific Research into Tastiness



Japan has accused the Australian Government as being racist on it's stance towards the Japanese position on whaling and it's so called "scientific" cull. The obvious question is to garner just exactly what sort of information that this scientific research is actually achieving.

18 years of research from the Japanese has produced a grand total of a mere 55 scientific papers. Just 55! Of those 55 only 14 have any relevancy to the world at large and of those 14 just 4 have actually gone through the process and have been peer reviewed.

How many whales has it taken to produce 4 papers? 6800. Perhaps I'd better put a different spin on that. That's 1700 whales per paper. Mind you, the quality of the writing has mainly incuded details such as length and weight, which isn't really all that different from what your local butcher or abatoir is doing on a daily basis.

There's not people on board these ships saying "ooh look, they have a different metabolism to us" or "they produce a different set of chemicals here". No, it's more like "killed 40 whales and the average length was 8m". This is work that an 8 year old kid could do. Nothing about finding a cure for cancer or other diseases, just "there's another dead one, 4m, now eat"

Yup. Vital research there. I'm wondering if I can get myself registered with the CSIRO and conduct scientific research on cuts of steak. Can anyone spell "ethics" please?

And now:


Tony Blair's Imaginary Lunch
"Whale"


Because it's so tasty.

No comments: