And here I thought the problem was the burping

This article jolted me out of my boozy post-dinner stupor. Some guy did a study showing that beer consumption negatively correlates with scientific publication records.

Now, before you leap up in alarm and perhaps knock over your brewski, take heart in the knowledge that the author conducted this research by surveying his fellow Czech ornithologists. I don't know about you, but I feel confident that the beer/prowess curve looks a little different among my species of biologist. (Hope I'm not giving up pseudonymity here to reveal that I am neither Czech nor a birder.)

The author, Tomas Grim (all of the jokes about Czech ornithologists, and people named Grim, are left as an exercise to the reader), leaves open the question of whether this beer-to-bad-pubmed-record correlation is causal: do you get bad data because you drink, or do you drink because you get bad data? A veritable chicken-egg question for all of us.

Anyhow, the point is this article really opened my eyes. Starting now, I'm swearing off Czech beer.