It’s become a joke that physicists think they understand all ‘lesser’ fields of science than the people with actual training. Now we lesser beings have a beautiful example to point at and laugh.

An Australian astrophysicist, stuck at home by the pandemic, decided to try and build a device to help with the coronavirus — a gadget that would signal when your hands moved close to your face. I have to admit that that does sound like something a physicist would be capable of doing, but everything went wrong. He somehow thought putting magnets in his nose would be helpful.

Reardon said he placed two magnets inside his nostrils, and two on the outside. When he removed the magnets from the outside of his nose, the two inside stuck together. Unfortunately, the researcher then attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them.

“At this point, my partner who works at a hospital was laughing at me,” he said. “I was trying to pull them out but there is a ridge at the bottom of my nose you can’t get past.

“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.

“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”

Before attending the hospital, Reardon attempted to use pliers to pull them out, but they became magnetised by the magnets inside his nose.

“Every time I brought the pliers close to my nose, my entire nose would shift towards the pliers and then the pliers would stick to the magnet,” he said. “It was a little bit painful at this point.

It’s terribly unfortunate that he ran out of magnets. If only he’d had a few more this story could have gone on even longer!

I guess it is. I have to say it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore — It’s astounding, Time is fleeting, Madness takes its toll — since I’m just stuck at home, seeing no one, coming unmoored from everything, but I do have a thought which makes me feel slightly better.

Which would you rather?

A. Have a job that lets you work from home, even if it means you’re in isolation.
B. Be isolated at home without a job.
C. Not be isolated because your boss forces you to work in some mindless service job.
D. Not be isolated because you have an essential job, like health care, that exposes you to a high likelihood of getting COVID-19.
E. Have the disease.

There, that puts it all in perspective. I’m an A. I am so lucky. Which one are you?

Anyway, today my plan is to churn out a video lecture for intro bio — the historical battle between biometricians and saltationists, which was basically resolved by everyone realizing that genetics was so much more complex than Mendel thought, followed by a lot of non-Mendelian examples — and get that ready to post by Monday.

Sunday is going to be spent churning out a video lecture on linkage mapping for genetics. There are always students who get lost on this stuff, so I expect to spend some Zoom time going over it next week. Then I have to finish grading some lab reports.

I am going absolutely nowhere. Spiders were fed the other day, so I’m not going to set foot in the lab this weekend. I have everything I need to live on in my house, so no trips to the store. I might step out onto the deck to my fenced back yard and remind myself what the sun looks like, but otherwise, I am definitely an A.