Craig is temporarily a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is looking for a permanent position. He spends most of his time balancing his overwhelming geekdom with normalcy so he can function in the real world. Luckily his wife likes his geekiness.
Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He studies deep corals and ocean fronts, and he loves to be on the water.
Kevin Zelnio is a Graduate Student Researcher at Penn State studying the ecology of hydrothermal vent and methane seep communities. He raises awareness of the plight of the spineless through folk music.
Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.The credit for this scientific eponym goes completely to Jason Robertshaw at Cephalopodcast, the formalization is mine.
Gorton's Measure states that the time for someone to ask "Can you eat?" when discussing a marine species is directly proportional to the rareness, strangeness, and repulsiveness of the species.
where theta=time for someone to ask "Can you eat?"
t=total people in room
alpha=species' rareness
sigma=species' strangeness
delta=species' repulsiveness
This is related to Gorton's Constant (Gamma) that states that the question "How well does it go with lemon and butter?" will occur at a very high percentage approaching infinity despite relative changes in audience size (n).
Comments
That is hilarious!
Posted by: Chris M | November 14, 2007 3:04 PM
This novel research begs further study, such as the question "Can your batter and fry it?". The coefficient of battering, β, is a function of the number of individuals in the audience, n, and the proportion of any audience that eat healthy foods, Ph, such that β ∝ n x (1-Ph) x θ. This is the probability of this question coming up in a random audience. In an audience composed of people from southern or rural areas, the proportion is raised to the (mn) power, where m is the number of southern or rural individuals and n is still the total number of audience members.
Posted by: kevin z | November 16, 2007 8:57 AM
I thought scienceblogs would be up on the html tags.
The coefficient of battering is (beta), (beta) is proportional to n(Ph)(theta).
Posted by: kevin z | November 16, 2007 9:02 AM
Maybe this will allow us to make new inroads towards solving the classic question: "And do you want fries (chips) with that?"
Posted by: Raynfala | May 9, 2008 11:59 AM