Academentia can be fun!

I am mired in the annual spring semester c.f. that includes search committees (not that I should complain since many of us face salary cuts, furloughs, hiring freezes and, alarmingly, the firing of tenured professors - see Chronicle of Higher Ed for the latter), grading, and more. The term "Spring Break" is a perverse misnomer since we all use it to catch up on teaching and administrative work or attempting to write and research. So I welcomed any excuse to laugh out loud and that is what I found today in my inbox.

My fellow academentia suffering friends and I banter on-line comparing hilarious titles from our respective disciplinary academic conferences, CAA and MLA in particular are rich in this regard. But nothing prepared us for these posts from the awesome NCBI/ROFL section of the Discover blog, which re-posted an article from Wired featuring absurd-but-true science-related article titles.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/03/10/ncbi-rofl-top-10-absurd-papers-from-2009/

For me the best one, given my recent romantic woes and fascination with game theory applications is:

The “booty call”: a compromise between men’s and women’s ideal mating strategies.

The one below is priceless, file under "scientists manage to get funding to float studies to discover the obvious" (on a serious note, their salaries are way higher than those for those of us in the humanities)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/03/04/ncbi-rofl-womens-bust-size-and-mens-courtship-solicitation/