What A Scientist Sees That Others Don't

Lonely Planet lists Port Arthur as the most visited destination in all of Tasmania. It is not hard to imagine why. The history of this place is of national and international significance. Established as a penal station in 1830, Port Arthur has more architectural and anthropological history, and more heritage value packed into 40 ha than the rest of Australia has within its 7, 694, 024 km2. I'm not kidding; it is a full-on mind-soaking experience.

It is also notable for an atrocity far worse than any experienced by the convicts back in the day. It is the site of Martin Bryant's massacre of  35 men, women and children (a further 19 wounded) in 1996. Oh, the irony: So much suffering has been endured at what is now a simply magnificent place. I don't believe that I am at all overstating the sensory impact that Port Arthur has on the average Australian or International tourist. It is overwhelming, which makes the following account of my first visit here all the more abstract.

It was 2003 and I had decided to invest what little money I had as a PhD scholar into attending the Australia New Zealand Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry conference in Hobart. Budget travel (red-eye), budget accommodation (shared with many) and budget food (beer and whatever biscuits appeared on the coffee breaks). We, the delegates, had the last day free before our flight home so, like every other tourist that visits Tasmania, we chose to spend it at Port Arthur. 

Now I am hoping that the delegate to whom I make reference was at least a little enamored with the architectural, historical, cultural, religious, engineering and anthropological attributes of Port Arthur because, as I tottered along behind her, she espoused an observation so very underwhelming that I can still recall it 12 years later. 

She observed the wear and tear in the steps leading out of the Commandant's House and remarked that the abrasions of nearly two hundred years of foot traffic reflected the inverse shape of a Bell Curve (Normal or Gaussian Distribution). If you are not a scientist do please flick to this page so you know what I am talking about. In short, a bell curve is a graphical representation that shows a common pattern of how the majority of a collection of data points or values describing one variable (e.g. human height or human weight) fall close to and either side of the average or mean. Many values falls further from the mean and far few values fall far from the mean; at the extremes. For instance 500 adult blokes may weigh 80 kg, another 450 blokes may weigh either 75 or 85 kg and only 50 blokes would weigh either 50 or 110 kg. 

Despite the 'Nerd Factor' of this comment she was pretty much spot on. On average people stepped in the middle of the step with about 50% stepping to the right and 50% stepping to the left of center. 95% of the ascents or descents down these steps were made within two standard deviations of the mean, and some people went down the steps or up the steps way over to one side or the other!! The tendency for the wear to be to the left may reflect the fact that this side has a hand rail? How ridiculously dull, but delightfully logical.

Check out that nearly bimodal distribution on the bottom step! That is a whole-nother story

I vowed to myself that if I ever went back to Port Arthur I would photograph the steps as a tribute to my fellow delegates scientific insight and I did exactly that. But like any true scientist I had to further investigate this paradigm of predictability so I sought out some better examples. This is what we, as scientists, call 'one-up-man-ship'. In this next example we have the repeated pattern of the normal distribution through the sedimentary layers of this sandstone step!! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!!

Such an astute and agile scientist am I that I even managed to capture an image that re-enforces this paradigm in real time allowing me to surmise something truly profound.The person in the photo is a complete stranger to me. She knows nothing about me other than the fact that I was lying in the hallway of the Commandant's House taking photos of people's feet for no apparent reason. But this observation facilitates a conclusion about this lady that is as sinister as it is profound: like the thousands of deviants and misfit convicts that trod before her over these very steps nearly 200 years ago, this woman chooses to walk one standard deviation left of the mean!!! It proves conclusively that all Aussies are basically just the progeny of convicts.