Friday, April 23, 2010

A Modest Proposal

This story has been going around the internet for a little bit. Basically, an Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, blamed a loss of morals and immodestly dressed women for causing earthquakes. As a small aside, this is not the first time a religious leader has blamed a natural disaster on society's loss of morals.

A woman on Facebook decided to test his theory. This got quickly out of hand, and her Boobquake Facebook event now has over 40,000 attendees.

With all of that said, I think this is a wonderful idea. In fact, I say we put the Boobquake Hypothesis through a proper scientific experiment. We can put the question of immodestly dressed women causing seismic activity to the test. With the proper experimetnal set up, I think we might even be able to get USGS funding for our research.

Unfortunately, Sedighi was a little short on information in exactly what was considered an immodesty induced quake. For example, how long of a lead time is needed for a boobquake or whether or not the epicenter would be centered in the vicinity of the cleavage. Like the flapping of a butterfly's wings causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, could scantily clad American woman be responsible for last weekend's earthquake in China? To control for this cleavage effect, I propose collecting global seismic activity for a month between experimental groups.

I suggest 3 data groups, a control group and 2 experimental groups. First, the control. That should be fairly easy; just dress normally. This will give us our starting baseline.

Now we're ready for our experimental groups. Let's take the modestly dressed group first. In order to provide proper skin coverage, I'm thinking proper Victorian dress with long sleeves, high collared shirts and about 10 petty coats. On second thought, perhaps we should all just wear loose fitting sweat suits, to kill any sexiness or fetish factor.

Next up is the real test, immodestly dressed ladies. Everyone break out your club wear. Short skirts and boob shirts for everyone. Maybe some pvc catsuits for variety. Groups such as FEMA and the Red Cross should be notified and standing by during this part of the experiment, in order to provide emergency response to areas hit by the quakes.

And just to cover all of our bases, we should throw in some experimental groups to test the guys, too. After all, all these earthquakes might actually be the result of Taylor Lautner's exposed pectorals.