Where do teaspoons actually go?
The problem of disappearing teaspoons has been long remarked on. Probably since teaspoons were invented. Fanciful theories about what causes it abound - they run away with the dish, it's the Borrowers, they turn in to wire coathangers, they dissolve steadily in to coffee and tea, they teleport to a planet far away that is teaspoon heaven, and so on.
An entire industry exists purely because of the disappearing teaspoon problem: think of all those stupid little plastic stirrers.
When pressed for more materialistic explanations, the folk wisdom seems to be that people take them away, often accidentally, and they find their way in to their home cutlery drawers. I find that implausible on the surface: I have noticed that teaspoons tend to disappear from my own cutlery drawer over time, such that occasional purchases of extra teaspoons are required to restock. (Were I less ethical, or less well off, a systematic programme of teaspoon theft might be indicated.) Other people I know report the same.
In more recent years, a ground breaking scientific study measured the phenomenon and put some parameters on it. (If you have BMJ access, the replies are worth a look too.) they found a rate of loss of approximately one teaspoon per 100 teaspoon-days, with individual teaspoons having a half-life of 81 days. Frustratingly, though, the investigators had no real insight in to the ultimate destination of the teaspoons. They plausibly suggest that a 'tragedy of the commons' effect is at work for the disappearance, but for where they go after that, they remark that "escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism [things conspiring against us] are equally plausible explanations".
Where do they actually go? And how could we find out?
Possible theories I think are at least one-the-surface plausible:
One way to be much surer, and to get some nice robust data, would be a medium-scale trial where we put radio-tracking/GPS devices in to teaspoons and track them over time. These have got way smaller in recent years, to the level where it is feasible to add them to teaspoons without substantially impairing their function. (Their more normal use is for tracking small animals.) This was mentioned in the paper as possible future work, and pretty much all the commentary about this study says that this is the obvious next step. But nobody, so far as I can see, has actually done it.
I have some field biologist chums who do this sort of stuff with wild animals and so could advise on technical details. The techie details and maths are probably within my own competencies, and I also know lots of people (including many of you) who would be able and willing to do it even better than I can. We'd need to be careful about the ethics - it's likely that we will end up tracking things to domestic households, and you can't ethically just barge in and demand 'Show us the teaspoons! We know you have them in there!', even though that would be fun. So you'd need permission forms and ethics clearance and so on. I could do that - I know a reasonable amount about research ethics - but am slightly nervous about putting it through the Human Research Ethics Committee at work. I have put many things past them, but this would obviously be not my day job. Or indeed anyone's. Also, organising it would be a fair amount of work, and also a not-inconsiderable sum of money. The tracking stuff does cost real money, and interested as I am, I'm not prepared to stump up that much money myself.
You know, I'm half-tempted to put up a Kickstarter to raise the cash to do it.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/294910.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
An entire industry exists purely because of the disappearing teaspoon problem: think of all those stupid little plastic stirrers.
When pressed for more materialistic explanations, the folk wisdom seems to be that people take them away, often accidentally, and they find their way in to their home cutlery drawers. I find that implausible on the surface: I have noticed that teaspoons tend to disappear from my own cutlery drawer over time, such that occasional purchases of extra teaspoons are required to restock. (Were I less ethical, or less well off, a systematic programme of teaspoon theft might be indicated.) Other people I know report the same.
In more recent years, a ground breaking scientific study measured the phenomenon and put some parameters on it. (If you have BMJ access, the replies are worth a look too.) they found a rate of loss of approximately one teaspoon per 100 teaspoon-days, with individual teaspoons having a half-life of 81 days. Frustratingly, though, the investigators had no real insight in to the ultimate destination of the teaspoons. They plausibly suggest that a 'tragedy of the commons' effect is at work for the disappearance, but for where they go after that, they remark that "escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism [things conspiring against us] are equally plausible explanations".
Where do they actually go? And how could we find out?
Possible theories I think are at least one-the-surface plausible:
- Teaspoon hoarders: a small number of people have secret stashes of shedloads of teaspoons. One could imagine that the teaspoon population is highly nonlinear, like a power law or something, so almost everyone has much less than the average number of teaspoons, and a small number of people have an eye-popping number. Finding them would be hard, though - there would be a lot of social stigma attached to admitting to being a teaspoon sink and the cause of so much social woe. But perhaps standard techniques used by researchers to find hard-to-reach and stigmatised populations could be brought to bear. (Although I doubt that there exist communities of self-identified teaspoon hoarders. But the dark net holds many surprises.) You might think to go for straight up bribery: confess to being a teaspoon hoarder and we'll give you lots of money. The problem with that is that it's likely to influence the phenomenon under analysis: smart but skint people will read the advert and nick a load of teaspoons simply to get the reward.
- Accidentally thrown away: Teaspoons find their way in to the rubbish. They're smaller than most other cutlery. We could track this by asking waste processing plants - which routinely separate out metal these days - if they find a lot of teaspoons.
- File drawer effect: Studies with unwelcome or plain boring results tend to languish unpublished in researchers' file drawers. Maybe teaspoons find their way in to non-cutlery drawers in large numbers. A systematic survey of the contents of lots and lots of drawers might reveal this, but would be really hard to organise, a lot of work, and really boring to do.
One way to be much surer, and to get some nice robust data, would be a medium-scale trial where we put radio-tracking/GPS devices in to teaspoons and track them over time. These have got way smaller in recent years, to the level where it is feasible to add them to teaspoons without substantially impairing their function. (Their more normal use is for tracking small animals.) This was mentioned in the paper as possible future work, and pretty much all the commentary about this study says that this is the obvious next step. But nobody, so far as I can see, has actually done it.
I have some field biologist chums who do this sort of stuff with wild animals and so could advise on technical details. The techie details and maths are probably within my own competencies, and I also know lots of people (including many of you) who would be able and willing to do it even better than I can. We'd need to be careful about the ethics - it's likely that we will end up tracking things to domestic households, and you can't ethically just barge in and demand 'Show us the teaspoons! We know you have them in there!', even though that would be fun. So you'd need permission forms and ethics clearance and so on. I could do that - I know a reasonable amount about research ethics - but am slightly nervous about putting it through the Human Research Ethics Committee at work. I have put many things past them, but this would obviously be not my day job. Or indeed anyone's. Also, organising it would be a fair amount of work, and also a not-inconsiderable sum of money. The tracking stuff does cost real money, and interested as I am, I'm not prepared to stump up that much money myself.
You know, I'm half-tempted to put up a Kickstarter to raise the cash to do it.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/294910.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.