Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 10, 2024

It’s for SCIENCE, for crying out loud.

Let’s get this straight. Caulfield is going to weigh himself before and after Mrs Olsen sits on the whoopee cushion? But what if he doesn’t feel any guilt?

21g is about 0.74 ounces. That’s 0.03% of the body weight of a (135 pound) person.

Soul merchants are not to be trusted!

Mary Roach addresses the “21 grams” thing in her book “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.”

Caulfield’s “Supposedly” is a good way to introduce the claim…

Google: McGill University the real story behind 21 grams.

On the other hand, this may provide as good a question as any to the ultimate answer:

“What is the mass of Love, when soul joins soul, expressed in grams?” 42!

The 21 grams experiment refers to a scientific study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-quarters of an ounce. Wikipedia

Caulfield, this time you may have gone too far

If a soul’s mass is 21 grams, then clearly the soul isn’t present from the moment of conception. At one week, a blastocyst only has a mass of about 0.2 grams…

The soul weighs nothing but counts for everything

Bodies are a living closet for souls. Without the latter, the former is a shell.

To get their average of 21 g, the people who did that “study” had to weigh a lot of people who were nearing death and then use only the readings they liked. If they had used all the data, they would have found that at the moment of death the average change in weight is approximately bupkis.

How much does Satan pay per gram?

Perhaps he hadn’t heard that Mrs. Olsen was a logician. Inferno 27, line 12!

Loved the 3rd HP movie TPOA when the dementors tried to suck out Sirius’s soul.

It’s called the Dr. Kevorkian diet.

I wonder how much the fart weighs… Does Mrs. O lose weight by expelling mass, or is the transaction more complicated? Like does she gain weight by losing buoyancy?

So for a soul to be lighter than a feather, it would have to be a very very big feather. Or wait, how many bodies did they weigh?

It seems that most of these strips start with a bad assumption by one of the kids.

If only the little snot would put that much effort into just doing the assignments….

I was going to mention the movie.Thanks for saving looking up the details.

That study that came up with 21g was severely flawed in many ways, including throwing out results that didn’t match with what the guy was hoping to prove.