The Theory of Compensation
... a thought about how to frame the gun violence debate ...
Before introducing the idea of mathematical modeling and its role in the scientific process to introductory physics students, I often write a heuristic model on the board of a large lecture hall before the class starts so that the students can ponder it while they are getting settled in. By making the heuristic humorous, I usually get a few snickers from some of the brighter students in the class early on, which leads the rest of the class to try and understand it. After all, everybody wants to be in on a joke; it’s a simple human tendency that I’ve found effective pedagogically.
Over the years, I’ve put up a variety, usually just coming up with something off of the top of my head before class. For example:
salt consumed * trips to the bathroom in a day = constant
time texting in class * course grade = constant
(driving speed - speed limit)^n = constant * number of speeding tickets in a year
The most spectacularly successful one that I've ever used is one that a friend suggested to me in the early 90s while we were driving on the highway. Noting the trend of larger and larger tires on pickup trucks, to the point of ridiculous impracticality, she humorously pondered whether the following relationship might be true to a certain degree:
pickup truck tire volume * phallus volume = constant
As one might imagine, this got a huge laugh from the class when I put it on the board, just due to the shock value alone. After the class was over, a young man came down to the front of the class to assure me that the large tires on his truck had nothing to do with the size of his penis. He was fairly upset and now worried that the girls in the class would think about the heuristic when they saw him driving his truck. I apologized to him, but I also pointed out to him how the larger tires made his vehicle much less stable while turning, with no effective advantage in off-road clearance. Later in the quarter, I put a problem on one of the exams analyzing the stability of vehicles in a turn, proving the danger of such high profile vehicles. He came down after the exam and told me that it no longer was an issue for him; he had put smaller tires on his truck weeks ago.
In that moment, I realized the power of mockery when applied to young single men. It seems that the last thing that a young heterosexual man wants any young heterosexual woman to think is that he has a small penis. With that in mind, I think it would be a great idea to introduce a corollary to the above expression into the debate about gun violence. I propose popularizing …
The Theory of Compensation
Applicable to male gun owners, excluding members of the military or police:
shell volume * magazine capacity * phallus volume = constant
My guess is that there’s a pretty strong correlation. After all, the best jokes have a nugget of truth in them. Granted, it’s not exactly Maxwell’s equations, but I’d love to see the following on a T-shirt someday; I’d buy one.
The Theory of Compensation
Vs*N*Vp = K
Vs = shell volume (m^3)
N = magazine capacity (#)
Vp = phallus volume (m^3)
K = a constant (m^6)
Even better, perhaps on a banner flying over the George R. Brown Convention Center in the heart of downtown Houston, TX, May 3-5, 2013 during the NRA national convention.
