Question: Did Judge Judy fart during taping of a television program that aired on November 6, 2015?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: “Judge Judy” is the television name of a former prosecutor and Manhattan district court judge named Judith Sheindlin. Apparently, she has had a tv program for many years, in which she renders verdicts on cases related to disputes over small amounts of money.
Obviously we have better things to do than to watch daytime court shows, but this one came to our attention recently when our Flatus Reflector alerted us to the existence of a possible fart in an episode that first aired on November 6, 2015. As described in previous posts, the Flatus Reflector is a proprietary algorithm that scans existing media for previously undetected farts. See this post for an example of a fart that was unearthed after being hidden for more than 70 years.
The fart from the Judge Judy episode can be heard toward the end of this audio clip:
Isolating the relevant section of the clip, we find the telltale signature of a fart, namely a short burst of sound energy in the frequency range of 250 – 300 Hz:
The multiphasic nature of the fart suggests that it might have been unusually smelly, though we obviously cannot recover this information directly. In any case, this fart caused the Flatus Reflector’s output to cross our detection threshold, as seen below, leading us to seek out the corresponding episode of Judge Judy.
Of course, the confirmation that a fart did occur in the courtroom does not necessarily implicate Judith Sheindlin as the source. Many people were in the room, including the crew, the plaintiff, the defendant, several witnesses, the audience, and, most importantly, an individual named Petri Hawkins-Byrd. Mr. Hawkins-Byrd serves as the bailiff on the Judge Judy program, and we believe he is responsible for the fart in question.
The reason is that Mr. Hawkins-Byrd was speaking during the occurrence of the fart, which means that his microphone was turned on. Careful viewing of the video shows that others in the room – the audience and contestants – were speaking but not audible, indicating that their microphones were turned off. That means that the culprit was either Mr. Hawkins-Byrd or Judge Judy herself.
We can distinguish between these possible suspects by examining the sound composition of the fart. In particular, as shown in the figure above, the fart had a peak sound frequency of 250 Hz. From previous work on allometric scaling laws of fart sounds, we can use this information to infer the size of the person who issued the fart, using the following general scaling law:
Here w is the weight of the subject in kilograms, and f is the sound frequency. Given that Judge Judy’s weight is 45 kg, we can say that her farts have a typical peak frequency of 272.8 Hz. In contrast, Mr. Hawkins-Byrd weighs 109 kg, so that his farts would be expected to have a peak frequency of 252.1 Hz. As the latter is far closer to the observed frequency, we can say that the bulk of the evidence points to Mr. Hawkins-Byrd as the culprit.