Ken’s Law of Disappearing Easter Eggs (Chris Drury Day)

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I’ve come up with a new scientific principle. I call it Ken’s Law of Disappearing Easter Eggs. My law states that when hiding Easter eggs, you will always find fewer eggs than you hid. I don’t know why exactly Easter eggs disappear, but I know that they do. I have my suspicions that they vanish from this reality entirely, rematerializing in another dimension—likely the same one missing socks go to after they vanish from the dryer. At this point, though, it’s merely a suspicion. In time and with proper university research grants, I may discover just where it is those Easter eggs go after they’ve disappeared (and maybe in doing so, discover where those socks go as well. I’m missing a rather nice argyll sock that I would very much like back), but for the time being, my law only stipulates that an undeterminable quantity of Easter eggs will disappear after you’ve hid them, never to be seen again.

I began postulating on the disappearance of Easter eggs some years ago. As a veteran of many Easter egg hunts, I noticed that, without fail, we’d end up with fewer Easter eggs than were hidden. Furthermore, no amount of searching would recover the unaccounted for eggs, try though we might. Oh lord how I’d try. I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to getting as much chocolate as possible, and I probably would have gone on searching until the missing eggs were found (which I’ve now come to discover would have been an ultimately exasperating experience); but recognizing the futility of my efforts and because we kids needed to stop wasting time and get cleaned up for the trip to the grandparents for Easter dinner, my parents would assure me that we’d find the missing eggs later…say, while cleaning. Yeah, cleaning. That’s it.

In hindsight I think it was a very clever opportunistic ploy: using missing Easter eggs as an incentive to do household chores. However, I quickly dismissed the possibility that the folks were intentionally withholding Easter eggs in an effort to manipulate us into helping with chores because even when the cleaning did occur, we still couldn’t find those missing Easter eggs. I mean, if the folks promised we’d find the “missing eggs” while cleaning, it stands to reason that those eggs would suddenly resurface. That’s how it works: you create a positive association between the task and its reward in order to increase the frequency with which the task occurs. No reward kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it? No, I think the eggs disappeared and our folks were equally as baffled as we were, but in their wisdom realized they might be able to use the opportunity to get some cleaning out of us. And darn it, it usually worked.

But of course, no amount of searching or cleaning ever caused those missing eggs to resurface. Nothing did. Not accidentally sitting on them while wearing our good clothes prior to leaving for an important engagement. Not the cat sniffing out some chocolaty goodness and choking on the foil wrapping. Not even emptying the entire contents of our house in preparation for a move could uncover what should have been several years’ worth of chocolate eggs. It was as if they simply ceased to exist. I never would have thought this was the basis for a scientific principle until recently however, when I was offered the chance to put some of my hypothesizes concerning disappearing Easter eggs to the test. To teach my Japanese students about Easter, I decided to share with them the joy of Eater egg hunting. Although it didn’t initially occur to me, I soon realized that my students, who have never experienced an Easter egg hunt before, were an untainted and unbiased group which would therefore provide me with uncorrupted data. They were the perfect control group to validate my theories. Thus, through my observations, I have come to the conclusion that the disappearance of Easter eggs is one of the governing principles of our universe, like gravity, Newton’s Law of Motion, and those socks who’ve lost their partner in the dryer.

Methodology:

School regulations forbid providing sweets and candy to students. There is a sign outside every school which, like the signs outside national parks warning visitors about the dangers of feeding the bears, cautions JETs not to feed the students (there aren’t really any signs. I made that up. But there should be because what I said about not giving students sweets and candy is true and violating this rule could cause some very serious brow furrowing). I’m not sure the exact particulars for the no sweets, no candy rule, but I’m pretty certain that unlike our national parks, the rule is not in place for fear of aggression against visitors. Rather, I’ve been told that in this society that is obsessive compulsive about saving face, the act of snacking or eating outside prescribed times suggests that the meal you’ve been generously provided by your family or school is insufficient. To go around munching on a chocolate bar between classes could be interpreted as flaunting such insufficiency and would therefore bring shame to your family and your ancestors and your ancestor’s ancestors. So chocolate Easter eggs were definitely out, much to the chagrin of the students. Besides, you can’t really buy chocolate Easter eggs here anyway. Instead, I made a set of 24 cards, each with a picture of an Easter egg on it. I then clearly laid out the parameters within which our Easter egg hunt would take place: there will be no eggs hidden in desks, lockers, school bags or other personal property. Anywhere else in the classroom would be considered acceptable hiding spots. With the parameters set, I asked the students to exit the classroom and wait quietly in the corridor while I hid the Easter eggs. Now I know any teachers out there reading this are gasping at the logistical nightmare of asking 35-40 grade 8 students to step out and quietly wait unsupervised in the corridor, but thanks to an oppressive and militaristic school system which regiments obedience, I knew the students would successfully fulfill my request. And indeed they did while my colleague and I hid Easter eggs.

Observations:

For first time Easter egg hunters, my students took to their task with a level of enthusiasm matching that of their western peers. This observation becomes even more impressive when you consider that they were looking for stupid paper eggs instead of actual chocolate. Nonetheless, the students gleefully scoured the predefined parameters and succeeded in finding a majority of the hidden eggs. However, as theorized, a comparison of total eggs found versus total eggs hidden revealed a discrepancy. The students conducted another search of the predefined parameters but even after this effort one single egg remained unaccounted for. I repeated my methodology (the only difference being we hid 23 eggs instead of 24) in a second class with similar results. And although it has little connection to my findings, it is interesting to note that in both classes there was at least one student who was adamant about finding that last egg. We were able to appease him with assurances that we’d find it when we clean. Now go get washed up for the trip to Grandma’s house.

Conclusion:

That this procedure was repeated twice and both times yielded identical results proves my hypothesis concerning disappearing Easter eggs. Moreover, the fact that 35-40 students meticulously searching a space the size of a normal living room could not find a missing egg lends credence to the notion that the eggs disappeared from this plain of reality altogether. Come on, 35-40 kids! No matter how hard my sisters and I would look, even if disappearing to another dimension could be the only possible explanation for why we failed to find those missing eggs, there was always a nagging doubt that maybe we didn’t look hard enough, that the eggs were too well hidden. There were only 2-4 of us at any given Easter, after all. But when you’ve got 35-40 super excited grade 8 students doing the searching, no way! If those eggs were still in this world, those kids would have found them. Of course, I suppose it doesn’t help that neither my colleague nor I could recall where we hid all those eggs, making the task of checking our hiding spots for verification impossible. Then again, our inability to recall where we hid the eggs could be part of the mystery surrounding the eggs’ disappearance. Perhaps the same forces that act upon an Easter egg to cause its disappearance also remove any recollection of where you hid that damn egg to begin with, so that your only evidence of its existence is the fact that you started by hiding 24 eggs but now there are inexplicably only 23. Although it’s no longer inexplicable any more is it? Nope. Thanks to my now scientifically proven Law of Disappearing Easter Eggs, we all know and can take comfort in the fact that, just as objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless they hit a brick wall or a very think tree, and chesterfields tend to say in your living room and don’t float away even after you’re done sitting on them because of a little thing called gravity, you will always find fewer Easter eggs then you hid. That’s just the way this crazy universe works.

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Comments

[kelsey]

stats
ken, that's all counting statistics. you have 24 "eggs", the error to the number of eggs you have is the square root of eggs, rounded up is 5 eggs. thus you hid 24 plus or minus 5 eggs. the fact that you found 23 eggs is in fact within error of the number of eggs that you had.