901: Temperature
| Temperature |
 Title text: And the baby has a fever. |
Explanation[edit]
This is a play on the fact that many digital thermometers look similar to pregnancy tests. Cueball, perhaps feeling ill, thinks he is using a thermometer to measure his body temperature and determine if he has a fever. As he is taking it orally, he is doubtless surprised when the thermometer tells him instead that he is pregnant.
The two bars on the 'thermometer' are the traditional lines that appear on a a common type of pregnancy test. One bar is the control line; it will become visible given any normal urine sample. If it doesn't appear, the test has been invalid. The other bar, the test line, reacts to human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone that's released during pregnancy. If both lines become visible, the test result is positive; if only the control line becomes visible, the test result is negative. Other results are invalid, since the control line didn't appear. This type of visual indicator, for both pregnancy and other testing processes, is so well understood that even the more complicated lateral flow readers with circuitry to detect nuances and a simple LCD display to announce the results will often feature a "one or two bar" display, either as a window on the actual "test line" strip or reproduced (as with this example) on the electronic output.
Depending upon the model, an actual thermometer may include a series of bars, alongside a set of readable digits, more displaying at higher registered temperatures. These may emulating the way various types of traditional thermometer have the indicating liquid filling their stem past graduations, but, being necessarily of coarser precision than a value, perhaps only as a gimicky visual metaphor or else to clearly highlight temperatures that are significant or out of range (e.g. the top bars shaped as the words "fever" and "error", if ever they are displayed during use/mis-use of the device). It is unknown what just two bars would indicate, if they were shown on a true digital-display thermometer, but the placement suggests it could have meant a measurement above room(/ambient) temperature but nowhere near expected body temperature.
Thermometers are typically used to measure temperature, and the title text notes that this clever thermometer has also detected a fever in the baby, presumably somewhere inside Cueball. 3001: Temperature Scales discusses units of measurement.
Transcript[edit]
- [A close up of Cueball with a thermometer in his mouth.]
- [The thermometer beeps.]
- Thermometer: BEEP
- [A full-body shot of Cueball looking down at the thermometer.]
- [A close-up of the thermometer's read-out.]
- Thermometer: PREGNANT
add a comment! ⋅ add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ 
refresh comments!Discussion
Apparently, male pregnancy is a thing. It requires surgery and artificial implantation, but it's a legitimate thing that yields live babies. Davidy²²[talk] 02:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_%28film%29 <-- reference 184.66.160.91 03:07, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
- That movie is fiction. Where is the reference to the actual fact? FlavianusEP (talk) 16:31, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_%28film%29 <-- reference 184.66.160.91 03:07, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
Just a bit of trivia: there's a photo online of a pregnancy test where the control line is not (or faintly) visible and the test line is very visible. Someone said that it can happen if there was so much of that hormone that the test line drained ink from the control line. 173.245.48.24 04:10, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
- If that happened you'd probably try again on a new test, possibly a different brand. If it kept happening it would probably want to see a doctor because something's going on there... -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 01:52, 14 January 2016 (UTC)
18 days of elevated basal body temperature are a sign of pregnancy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_body_temperature, no source given there, but I’ve read this somewhere else™ before). 162.158.94.224 09:03, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
- Hey, it's the close paren for #859! 172.70.207.78 20:38, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
What if the pregnancy tests didn’t tell him he was pregnant, it just was already used? SilverTheTerribleMathematician (talk) 05:30, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
