Formulaic Christmas nonsense

December 26th, 2007

It was too much to hope for to get through the season without someone, somewhere, attaching their name to a bogus scientific formula and calling it news. Ever since McVities paid Dr Len Fisher to come up with a formula for biscuit dunking, advertisers have seen the “perfect formula” story prove irresistible to media editors. Len Fisher, to his credit, performed some proper science to back up his equation, but this diligence didn’t follow on to the many scientists who were willing to pick up a cheque for attaching their name to some spurious nonsense.

First gong goes to Warwick Dumas from the University of Leicester, for allowing a shopping centre to talk him into releasing the formula for perfect present wrapping. Quite humorously, the press release went out with a typo, rendering his formula even more nonsensical:

2(ab+ac+bc+c)

Any schoolchild will immediately recognise this gives the surface area of a conveniently box-shaped gift, plus a mysterious extra ‘c’ – this was supposed to be C², translating as “a little bit of overlap to tape down”. Dumas insists his formula will help reduce wasted wrapping paper, though it’s hard to see how, given that he’s stated nothing more than common sense – that the present needs enough paper to cover it, and then a little more. He gets quite defensive about this, as you can tell from his replies on this blog criticising his equation. Whether his research is an extension of previous work performed by Dr Sara Santos at the University of Manchester is hard to say. At least Santos seemed to put some thought into it.

Next up is Prof. Rudi Dallos, who has furthered humankind’s sum of knowledge by “revealing” a formula for the perfect Christmas. Where Dumas opted for simplicity, Dallos has gone to great lengths to make his equation as complicated as possible. Quite humorously, this one was also printed with a typo, seemingly to no great detriment.

Typed out, Dallos’ formula looks like this: PX = 8F x 4P + £23 x 8F + 3G +2W +2W:3C + 5T:1NR divided by 3D. Hang on a second! This formula comes pre-loaded with values. This poses quite a problem to me, because it suggests that the formula was written around these values … almost as if Dallos wanted all these variables to be represented. Hmm… Still, he’s wrong, because this Christmas perfection is a dividend of the number of days spent with your family, so the less days spent with them, the more perfection you can achieve. In fact, you can have an infinitely good Christmas by not spending any time with your family at all! To Dallo’s credit, this story was cooked up to promote a new book from the Children’s Society, but I still don’t see why he couldn’t have sat in a tub of baked beans, or something that didn’t involve abusing science.

You can see more formula-news-nonsense here.

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