KEY POINTS:
What if Archimedes had taken a shower? The famous scientist of Syracuse leapt out of the bath and ran naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!" after suddenly realising that the volume of an irregular object was the same as the volume of water displaced when the object was submerged in water.
The point is this: researchers, naked or fully dressed, often don't know what they are looking for until they've found it. So cut some slack to Waikato University student Dave Snell, who has been given $96,000 to study the habits of heavy-metal fans.
It's easy to argue that the money might be better spent elsewhere, but it's all a question of your point of view. A carless cyclist might argue that money spent on motorways is money wasted. But any research that helps us understand more about social subcultures is useful. Who objects to the funding of research into gangs? Sex workers? Drug users?
Mr Snell, 27, told Radio New Zealand that the "stereotype" of a bogan is someone who wears tight black jeans and a Metallica T-shirt, sports a mullet or a shaved head and loves beer and cars.
To most of us, that would come as a surprise, since we would regard those attributes as constituting a description rather than a stereotype. Is he foreshadowing shock findings: a bogan who drives a Daihatsu Charade with a poodle on the back seat and loves nothing so much as a cup of herb tea while flicking through his Seals and Croft albums? Is it possible to wear a Metallica T-shirt and not be a bogan? We await the research results with interest.
