How much damage did Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes do to his parents’ house and possessions over the comic strip’s ten-year span? According to this recent paper published in the Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (PNIS), just under $16,000 in repair and replacement costs, based on present-day prices. The accumulated costs are displayed in the graph below, where you can see that most of them were incurred in the strip’s first year:
Click the graph to see it at full size.
If the paper’s writing style or the acronym of the publication — PNIS — got your “science senses” tingling, give yourself a pat on the back. PNIS is a humor publication in the guise of a scientific journal in the same way The Onion takes on the form of a newspaper. According to their About & FAQ page, PNIS articles fall into one of three categories:
- HARD, short for Honest And Reliable Data: “…the serious PNIS sub-journal. Papers published in HARD use actual data that were collected in some way by the authors (for example, data collected from an Internet resource (and properly cited, of course), or data from an experiment conducted by the authors).”
- SOFD, short for Satirical Or Fake Data: “Papers published in SOFD use data that are fabricated by the authors for some purpose (for example, fake data from a fake experiment).”
- Editorials: “…papers that generally do not have any associated experiments (real or fake) or hypotheses (real or fake). Mostly, their content is about science itself (and science-writing in particular).”
My inner 14-year-old was pleased to see this graph charting the projected readerships for HARD PNIS and SOFD PNIS in their introductory editorial:
