Theoretical Anatomy - Part 3
Headstands and vomit
Crivsola was trying to figure out what was wrong with her reasoning when we ended Part 2. Finally, after spending a few nights tossing and turning, she hit upon something. Maybe her father was a freak? Perhaps something was wrong with her father, and other humans don’t let their food out while doing a headstand?
The claim that food falls out when doing a headstand was about all humans. Just because it was true for one person doesn’t mean it is true for all. As an analogy, Crivsola had a scar on her right buttock. Just because she had a scar on her right buttock does not mean all humans have a scar there.
So, Crivsola decided to get a large number of people and make them do headstands. If all or even most of them let food out of their mouths, then she could be reasonably confident that humans let food out of their mouths when doing headstands.
When you are making a claim about a large number of things and cannot test that claim on all of them, you can test the claim on a sample representing the population. If the claim is true for the sample, then you can be reasonably convinced that it is true for the population. However, you cannot be sure that it is true for every population member.
Take the claim that humans have their hearts on the left. If you took a large sample of humans - like 1000 - odds are that you would see all their hearts on the left. However, 1 in 16000 humans have their hearts on the right.
So, she conducted the experiment. To her surprise, she found that in every instance, food came out of the mouths of those who did headstands.
Crivsola was still skeptical. She thought she would try doing a headstand herself. Then, however, she remembered that it was illegal for her to do a headstand. Only men were allowed to do headstands in Sonhlagot - that too, only those men who had drunk ten mammoth tusks full of Njusula, the locally brewed alcoholic beverage. This law was a result of lobbying by big Njusula-brewing corporations.
But, this bugged her so much that she decided that she would break the law. She did a headstand after breakfast, and nothing came out! What was going on? Why was she not letting food out while all of her subjects were? Was she a freak, or was there something else going on?
Crivsola was so lost in thought that she forgot to stop her headstand. Meanwhile, her nosey neighbor Jkopia looked into her cave and saw what she was doing. Within minutes, he called the police, and Crivsola was arrested.
Can you figure out what was going on? Why were all the participants of the study letting food out when doing a headstand?
We will meet Crivsola next in her jail cell, which she shared with Lomytguya, a worker at a Njusula factory who had been arrested for trying to start a union.