Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Err - I think so, Brain. But where are we gonna find rubber pants in our size?
Quiet, Pinky. Or I shall have to hurt you.

- Pinky & the Brain, "The Animaniacs"

hile physicists around the world labor diligently toward the Holy Grail of Physics - the Grand Unified Theory (affectionately dubbed GUT), which ambitiously seeks to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe into a single equation, the average college student is beset by inexplicable forces far more bewildering than anything a physicist can hope to fathom.

The Post-Finals Genius Effect is the unsettling way every concept, every theorem, every formula forgotten during the final comes rushing up the moment the test is finished, a few seconds after you walk out the door.

And even though physicists are allotted obscene amounts of government money to research worthless subjects like String Theory, little remains in the public coffers to fund answers to questions that plague the average college student ... questions like: "How does my roommate get away with sleeping all day and still earn 4.0 every quarter?" "What happens if I use a condom past its expiration date?" "If a married person earns a bachelor's degree, is that grounds for divorce?"

In any event, while one cannot ever hope to adequately fund all the vexing mysteries we encounter, surely a case could be made for research grants to answers to some of the most common and mysterious forces of college life:


The Starving Student Syndrome

Organizers of campus clubs and organizations are intimately aware of the formidable task of recruiting and retaining new members in an campus of otherwise lethargic students. As any of these officers can tell you, the surest way to guarantee new faces at a meeting is to post signs around campus advertising "Free Food." But for all the evil one may say about on-campus dorm food, it remains unclear why if free food is served at, say, 5:00 - the food will inexplicably disappear by 5:05, and the new faces, by 5:15 ... like a swarm of locusts sweeping away edibles en masse. Any public event that caters free food to attract college students suffers from this yet-explained phenomenon. Either dormitory fare has become dramatically worse since I've moved off-campus, or there are heretofore unmeasured quantum-mechanical effects that create localized matter-annihilating wormholes around groups of hungry college students.


The Mathematics Textbook Understatement Paradox

By all appearances, textbook writers, particularly writers of natural science and engineering textbooks, subscribe to strict Science-Textbook-Writer bylaws, which state that everything must be headed with elaborate, scary-sounding titles. Chemistry is particularly good in this regard, with intimidating titles like "Nonlinear Decay of Beta Particles in Radioactive Lanthanide Series Elements" and other text names that make one feel mighty smart to be seen carrying such books about. (Of course, taking a midterm or two in such a course can quickly eradicate such euphoria, but that is the topic of another discussion). One of the primary objectives of intimidating titles of science books is to screen out the unfit by frightening off the lightweights and poseurs.

Yet, while engineering and natural science writers adhere faithfully to the rule of creating intimidating textbook titles, math authors appear to be paradoxically obsessed with understatement. The average engineering student, used to tackling topics like "Nonlinear Beta Decays" and "Closed-Systems Thermodynamics," is wholly unprepared to decipher deceptively understated books like "Elementary Analysis." Elementary Analysis? Hey, they said it was 'elementary' ... how hard could it be? (Answer: "Kick-your-ass with a C+ hard"). Worse: "Partial Differential Equations." Well gee, who hasn't taken a partial derivative before?

My doctor says I should avoid discussions on "Real Analysis," to reduce the frequency of my episodic post-traumatic flashbacks of college so let's just say 'it sucks' and move along, ok?

( more mayhem inside )