Excuse me Geoff is ENERGY EFFICIENT

March 25, 2022 3:08 AM

My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand

There follows a long twitter thread with other examples of Lazy Geoffs.
posted by MartinWisse (35 comments total)

"average person sleeps 8 hours a day" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person sleeps 0 hours per day. Lazy Geoff, who lives in place & sleeps over 60,000,00o,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:19 AM on March 25, 2022 [34 favorites]

This Gary Larson cartoon linked in thread is one of my absolute favourites. I was cackling, teary eyed reading the thread and was disappointed that my husband doesn't have the same sense of humour as me.

Thank you, I enjoyed this immensely.
posted by freethefeet at 4:39 AM on March 25, 2022 [18 favorites]

For prior research, see Cook et al, 1996.
posted by zamboni at 5:08 AM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is good. *rolls over* zzz...
posted by y2karl at 5:25 AM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

The tweeting scientist has a publisher... she should write a children's book about Lazy Geoff.
posted by condour75 at 5:39 AM on March 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Would somebody more skilled than I be able to provide a Threadreader link or some such? Twitter doesn't want to let me, a twitterless plebe, read about all the Lazy Geoffs :-(
posted by cabbage raccoon at 5:44 AM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Threadreader version.

For future use, browse to https://threadreaderapp.com/ and paste the Twitter URL, click button, wait, etc.
posted by abulafa at 5:52 AM on March 25, 2022 [11 favorites]

Thank you Abulafa! Lazy Geoffs, here I come!
posted by cabbage raccoon at 6:04 AM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Geoff found satori.
posted by hypnogogue at 6:47 AM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel a kinship with this Lazy Geoff. If someone offered me a particularly nice rotten log or burrow to hide in right now for a few months, I would probably take it.
posted by fight or flight at 6:53 AM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

I appreciate the shout out to the Olm - and checked out its wikipedia page: living in darkness, over a lifespan of 60 years or more, in water that is only varies in temperature by about a degree and preying on passing snails - but with the need to eat one only as little as once a decade - it has to be on the candidate list of the most boring animal to attach a tracker to.
posted by rongorongo at 7:06 AM on March 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

Unfortunately, all the good stuff is the the replies, which are not included by threadreader. Try opening the Twitter link in an incognito mode window. That usually helps.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:14 AM on March 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

I don't appreciate being called "lazy". I'm just a homebody.
posted by giltay at 7:17 AM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I find this entire thread offensive.
posted by geoff. at 7:33 AM on March 25, 2022 [96 favorites]

Thank you CheeseDigestsAll!
posted by aramaic at 8:40 AM on March 25, 2022

Oh my god, the author of the thread is the co-author of the Does It Fart? series: Does It Fart?, True or Poo?, and Believe It Or Snot.

BRB buying these for every science-loving child I know.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:41 AM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well dang.
posted by biogeo at 8:55 AM on March 25, 2022

The Lazy Geoff thread on Nitter (Nitter mirrors Twitter but is less user-hostile)
posted by Monochrome at 10:46 AM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Good Vibes Only" Geoff.

Thanks for the laugh.
posted by praemunire at 10:52 AM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Lazy Geoff ... is an outlier adn should not have been counted

I am a big fan of the Georg snowclone because it makes me giggle every time. It's actually appeared in a textbook, which does not much amuse the author, who's tired of it.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:01 AM on March 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm fine with Georg eating all the spiders, he can have my share!
posted by supermedusa at 11:08 AM on March 25, 2022

I assume olm scientists and pitch-drop scientists commiserate with each other. Very very occasionally
posted by clew at 1:37 PM on March 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

And that animal is just thriving out there,doing literally none of the stuff his buddies do, and noone really understands why or how the animal is continuing to live its best life out there

So it seems to me we need a study on the "Efficient Geoffs" to figure out how these animals are living their best lives while their buddies are so active. What do they know or have that the "Busy Geoffs" don't? Why are they so efficient, and how do we all get there? (assuming, of course, that they aren't some type of predatory lender of the animal world, and everyone else is busy bringing them what they need to live the high life).
posted by nubs at 1:47 PM on March 25, 2022

My very, very favorite example of this phenomenon is in a singing mouse paper (Ribble & Rathbun, 2018):

Male #21, 3 days after he was radio-collared, was recorded between 0800 and 1720 h at the same four locations on the ground under a mound of dense forest debris. The next morning at approximately 0600 h we discovered the signal in a tree about 2 m above the mound coming from a Side-striped Palm Pitviper (Bothriechis lateralis, Peters 1862) snake with an obvious mid-body bulge.

*chef's kiss* as a bonus Male #21 comprised fully one quarter of their sample size, poor bastards
posted by sciatrix at 1:56 PM on March 25, 2022 [20 favorites]

How do I make sure my friends never see this Twitter thread? Because I am (was) an animal behaviorist, and a Geoff, and lazy, and I'm pretty sure I won't hear the end of it.
posted by biogeo at 2:33 PM on March 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

Have you checked for degrees of separation? Could Efficient Geoff already be named for you?
posted by clew at 6:12 PM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well I know what I'm going to be worrying about all night now.
posted by biogeo at 6:24 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I showed the Twitter thread to my wife just now, because I have no self respect, and her immediate question was, "Does someone have a tracker on you?"
posted by biogeo at 6:27 PM on March 25, 2022 [15 favorites]

Some animals with a tracking device are smart enough to realize they are living proof alien abduction is real, and are just marking time until they’re picked up by the mothership.

Or, what sciatrix said.
posted by jamjam at 8:33 PM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Okay, what message should biogeo take to the aliens?
posted by clew at 10:02 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Threadreader version.

Doesn't actually solve the problem when what you're after is a thread of replies, but someone's individual tweet thread. So that shows you all of Dani Rabaiotti's tweets, but none of the replies - which are the thing that Twitter is nasty about letting you see if you're not logged in (and are where most of the content is on this post).

I really enjoyed reading this, until I scrolled a line or two past the "show more replies" button and Twitter decided I wasn't allowed to see anything but a sign up prompt again.
posted by Dysk at 12:30 AM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Does someone have a tracker on you?

You know that thing where you hear a phrase for your entire life, then one day you actually stop and think about the meaning? Like "chicken drumstick" which for some reason I have heard probably thousands of times without thinking "oh, yeah, because it has a stick bit and a bigger bit at the end, like an actual drumstick"?

That is more or less the sensation I had, on realizing that I have put a tracker on myself, to study my own movements and sleep patterns, as if that was in any way a normal thing to do.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:25 AM on March 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

Have a friend who used to refer to his basset hound Scooter as “Energy Star compliant.”
posted by Devils Rancher at 2:13 AM on March 26, 2022 [21 favorites]

FitBit has long known this.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:44 AM on March 26, 2022

I have one of these animals in my house. His name is George, and he is a long-haired grey guinea pig who looks like nothing quite so much as a waddling toupée. His excuse lately is extreme old age: he was an adult when we obtained him in 2014.

He’ll still get excited if I give him some new enrichment, like a new toy or some high-value veggies. But he’ll also fall hard asleep on his face in improbable places, like halfway into the door of his plastic igloo.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:11 AM on March 26, 2022 [7 favorites]