Easy as Pi
by Mad Dog

   According to a study published in the journal Cell (motto: “If you don’t think one is the loneliest number, ask an amoeba”), sedentary mice who were given the drug AICAR burned more calories and had less body fat than mice who didn’t get any. Drugs, that is. While mice won’t build muscles this way, the researchers found that those who got off their rodent butts and onto a treadmill while taking the drug were able to run 44 percent farther and 23 percent longer than the slacker mice who sat around eating Purina Mouse Bonbons while reminding the exercisers how Jim Fixx died. In other words, mice can now choose between doing nothing and losing some weight, or exercising and losing more. Being an underachiever I know which group I’d be in.

   That is, of course, assuming AICAR will work on people. Unfortunately many experiments that are successful on mice don’t do diddly for us. Remember leptin? I didn’t think so. About 10 years ago scientists found that giving leptin to obese mice helped them lose weight. The media trumpeted it as a miracle weight loss pill but, alas, it didn’t do much for humans. Well, not unless you owned a newspaper or magazine that sold a lot of copies because of the over-hyped stories you ran.

   Or is there? A professor at Bucks New University in England (motto: “So what if we’re not improved, at least we’re new”) wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement that he thought the magazine’s name was dyslexic. Just kidding. Actually he said he thinks college educators should relax and let students spell words any way they want as long as it’s phonetically correct. "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith wrote. "University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

   This would certainly make life easier for everyone. Students wouldn’t have to learn how to spell properly, parents would have lower blood pressure because the kids have less homework to fight over, and teachers would spend less time correcting papers. This would not only be less stressful all around, it would also give everyone more time to do constructive collegial things, like throw sheep at, poke, and pass virtual hot potatoes to each other on Facebook.

   Actually, making spelling more flexible isn’t such a bad idea, at least until someone develops a pill that makes us spell well without having to go through all that icky memorization. But why stop there? Why not extend the concept to math. After all, if people have trouble adding—and if you’ve ever been in a store when the cash register isn’t working and the cashier tries to make change without a display showing them how much to hand you, you know they can’t—then why not adjust the math? It seems to me that if it’s okay to have an arguement for different spellings—to use a variant Smith thinks should be accepted—then why not allow one and one to equal three sometimes? Or make it acceptable for any answer between three and eight to be “a few”? Hey, I’m a smart guy and am pretty good at math, yet for some reason I’ve always had a problem with a few sections of the multiplication table. Seven times eight, six times nine—they muddy up. So instead of my having to remember which answer is 54 and which is 56, why can’t we just make them both an even 55, which is much easier to remember?

   It would be nice if all of this would catch on. Life would be as easy as wun, too, thre. Not only that, but they could add up to whatever you like. Now if I could only pop a second pill so I could take a nap while my body “ran” another four miles.

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These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them while exercising on your La-Z-Boy.