A tangent of epic proportions...

Since I've managed to get through another day without putting my children up for sale on e-bay and / or convincing one of my large, Polynesian relatives to dropkick their father across the patio a few times, I think a glass of wine and a celebratory blog-post are in order. (If you think I'm possibly setting the bar of fun pretty low with a blog-post, just remember that while some of you have lives, I have basic misanthropy. Whatever gets you through the day.) Anyway, I may have to recant everything I've said re: anthropogenic global warming, because I have just been emailed definitive proof of it's existence:

You may laugh (I freakin' did), but others have taken this seriously, and had some deep and meaningful thoughts of how climate change may force us all into bamboo knickers. Polyester undies seem to be on the out, with some people suggesting we ban the slippery stuff in all its forms, due to (wait, I bet you can't guess) the percieved carbon footprint.
The AGW crowd aren't the only ones to have privately wondered about the knock-on (no pun intended) fertility effects of your tighty whities. So did my personal research hero, Dr. Ahmed Shafik:

The fearless Egyptian sex researcher, who asked the important and oft-wondered question: Does wearing polyester pants stop you getting laid? He answered this question (it was "Yes", in case you're wondering), by dressing lab rats in pants of various textiles.

Which is possibly the cutest (and yet vaguely disturbing) thing I have seen in a long while. Dr. Shafik, I salute you! (And the rat that took one for the team, too).

Now compare the quality research of Dr. Shafik, who represents one of the last bastions of pure scientific inquiry unsullied by crass politics, with that of these bandwagon jumpers:

The relationship of long term global temperature change and human fertility

Who somehow got research funding to point out that in 19 industrialised nations:

"In general, birth rates declined markedly throughout the century except during the baby boom period of approximately 1940 to 1964."

Well, duh. Naturally, (probably because they missed the lecture in Statistics 101 on confounding factors) they correlate this with increasing surface temperatures and conveniently limit their sample to those years between 1900 and 1994, even though the paper was published in 2003, thus neatly excising those years after 1994 where global surface temperatures actually declined.

Somehow, it never occurred to them that the contraceptive pill was invented and rolled out to the masses in the 1960's in the aforementioned industrialised nations, which may account for some of that decline in fertility. Or that possibly the two World Wars might have been a bit of a procreative downer. Or, and bear with me on this, it wasn't the contraceptive pill at all that decreased fertility rates, but the fact that polyester budgy smuggler's became widely available at around the same time.

A note on layout: Sorry about the dodgy formatting, everyone. I tend to hasty postings, dodgy (and yet very fast) typing and am generally a bit of a neo-luddite when it comes to all things digital. My toddler had to show me what that little scrolling wheel thingy on the mouse does. One day I dream of a nice guy telling me I give good html, but until then it's lines through the middle of text and links to nowhere, I'm afraid.