Peoples Republic of Science

15th Jan 2013

Ah c’mere it’s getting ridiculous at this stage. You expect Cork to come out tops or close to it in most inter-county competitions but the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition competition is being dominated wholesale by Cork’s wonder kids.

Ciara Judge, Sophie Healy-Thow and Emer Hickey were announced the latest winners of the overall competition last Friday and they brought a tear to our Corkonian eyes as they stepped up on the platform to receive their much deserved award.

The Kinsale students’ project focussed on the effects of bacteria on plant germination, with their research potentially having future implications for tackling issues such as food scarcity. What a noble goal!

Ciara Judge, Emer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow, the 2013 BT Young Scientist and Technologists of the year

PROUD TO BE A NERD
The science and technology industry is considered extremely important by the People’s Republic of Cork provisional-government-in-hiding as reaffirming our county as the premier nerd centre in Europe and victories like this will be critical in bringing tens of thousands of extra science jobs to Leeside when we achieve full independence.

After the amazing feats of students John D. O’Callaghan and the fantastically Cork-named, Liam McCarthy in winning the EU Young Scientist award in Paris in 2009 the People’s Republic took the bold decision to give “Science & Technology” the same status in Cork as “Hurling and Football” – it was even argued at the time that the latter could become a subset of the former paving the way for the beatification of another highly regarded Cork pairing: “Beamish and Murphy’s” – modern miracles of science themselves.   

John D and Liam Mac from Kinsale when they claimed the top spot

THAT’S THE JOB
We must be cautious though – there are knock on effects of our success that aren’t always positive: Queues will form at the immigration offices on our borders as Kerrymen and Waterfordonians queue for permission to enter Cork to grab the remaining menial jobs : cleaning our flat bottom flasks and pipettes in our labs while we take a break from curing diseases and bringing us cups of tea while we write control system software for the air conditioners for Cork’s base on the moon.  

This will obviously present difficulties as Cork is running short of the soggy bogland required as homes by these non-Cork individuals. Our city and county councils must plan ahead accordingly.

Aisling Judge bagged the top prize in 2006.  (for the mental health of Corkonians we have removed the face of the Dublin Fianna Fáiler desperately trying to squeeze into the photo)

HOME AND AWAY
At what point are we down here in Cork entitled to a ‘home game’ when it comes to this particular code?  Isn’t it about time that the BT Young Science & Technology Exhibition was brought home to Cork? The Dubs have been hogging this yoke for far too long.

Students from up the country would benefit hugely from the academic atmosphere of Cork city. For example, if the exhibition was held in Neptune Stadium students on their break around Blackpool would be amazed at how locals everywhere banter about the latest developments in microelectronics, silicon doping techniques, energy modelling and critical updates to UNIX kernels – and that’s only the casual conversations  that go on in chippers.

Many people from outside Cork aren’t aware of how academic pub conversations can be in the People’s Republic and sometimes they can get quite heated as passions roar.

What's wrong with Neptune, like?

Last week we visited a pub on the Northside in which a brawl took place over an equation found written on the back of a beermat describing the flight of a rubber ring at a rings board. There was consternation over a constant “R” used in the formula to describe the air resistance in front of the rings board.

One group said it didn’t take into account the extent of a draught from a fire escape to the left of the rings board while others said that factor was statistically insignificant due to the high velocity of the ring.

The Quinn Ryan on Barracka had to close down when a dispute broke out about Einstein's famous energy equation. Some customers said his equation was 'a wind up' and was actually a reference to a yoke dealer and well known raver in Mahon called MC Squared.

A number of people were barred and all rings competitions have been cancelled until the results of a peer review paper on the matter compiled by the bouncer-on-the-night are published in a respected academic journal.

That’s how we roll in Cork folks. Good luck catching up with us.

So, with such a learned population and highly decorated science students like the Kinsale trio would it not be beneficial for the country’s aspiring scientists to show off their projects in the scientific capital of Ireland?

To be fair to Dublin, not everyone there is a complete gombeen but if the exhibition is to practice what it preaches (i.e. modern evidence and results-based science) then they should look at the list of winners and conclude from the data that the exhibition should be moved to Cork for the foreseeable future.

After all, we more or less invented the Internet,  didn’t we?