Improbable Research

There are few peer-reviewed papers on the subject of designing and testing an improved packaging for hollow chocolate bunnies. Of these articles, the most bouncily thorough is one called “Designing and Testing an Improved Packaging for Large Hollow Chocolate Bunnies.”

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian. Read it here.

“The bureaucratic hand meets with the Bureacracy Club.” So saying, a wishes-to-be-unnamed member of the latter has sent a link to a photograph of the former. See the photo here.

The Bureaucracy Club’s home page is, as always, here.

The Bureaucracy Club is abuzz at the discovery of a new red tape taskforce. Investigator Tim Churches sends word of the existence of the GP Red Tape Task Force. A perfectly bureaucratic Task Force PDF can be accessed here.

The Bureaucracy Club now hopes to find web pages for additional official Red Tape Task Forces, and would be pleased to hear from anyone who can supply a current URL pointing to same.

How dangerous is marijuana? Thanks to Dr Peter Maguire and his careful use of basic mathematics, now we know.

Details are in a January 21, 2004 news report from Reuters (read the full report here):

“Cannabis is a drug that can kill,” Dr Peter Maguire, deputy chairman of the BMA’s board of science told Reuters. “People are making the conclusion that it is safe where in fact it is actually more dangerous than tobacco.”

That is the key point: that marijuana is actually more dangerous than tobacco. The report gives further evidence:

Britain has an estimated five million cannabis users and government figures suggest that its use has grown sharply in the last 20 years.

On Tuesday, a coroner recorded that a British man had died as a direct result of smoking the drug. Lee Maisey, 36, smoked up to six cannabis joints a day and is thought to be the first Briton to die as a direct result.

For the better part of a century, authorities have been looking for clear medical proof that marijuana is dangerous. The actual death of a human being — Mr. Maisley — would be difficult to argue away.

Dr. Maguire and the British Medical Association have issued an official statement on the danger of marijuana. See it here. The report features comments from Dr. Maguire, and presents this additional information:

Every year, around 120,000 people in the UK who smoke tobacco cigarettes die as a result of their habit.

Every year, 120,000 people in Britain die from smoking tobacco. And now one person has died from smoking marijuana. This trend is ominous.

Dr. Maguire would like to teach us all a good lesson. Perhaps we ought to pay attention.

The phrase “upside-down, into the void” sums up a report in the BMJ (vol. 328,January 17, 2004, p. 176):

A 67 year old man presented with lower urinary tract symptoms and many episodes of near-acute urinary retention, which he found, by trial and error, he avoided by standing on his head for 5-10 minutes each time his stream was cut off, finding then he was able to void again. X ray examination showed multiple bladder calculi, which undoubtedly obstructed his dependent bladder neck while he was standing but not while he was upside down. At open cystolithotomy more than 300 stones, weighing over 400 g, were removed.

That same section contains a simple, dryly worded nugget of advice for medical diagnosticians:

Computed tomography colonography?or virtual colonoscopy?is gaining ground as a minimally invasive technique for visualising the colon and screening for early neoplasms. Unfortunately, the images of the colon are accompanied by images of the other abdominal organs, bones, blood vessels, and soft tissues. These unwanted data may irritate the clinician, who has no choice but to consider other diagnoses. A study of 75 patients in Denmark (Gut 2003;52: 1744-7) found that 49 had extracolonic abnormalities and 12% needed further investigation. Two patients needed surgery.

Read them both, and see an X-ray of the voiding gentleman, here.

George Nichols, who helped give birth to Murphy’s Law, will make an exceedingly rare public appearance tomorrow night (Jan 27) at Caltech. He was head of the project at Edwards Air Force Base in California where, in 1949, he, Colonel John Paul Stapp, and Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr. jointly, if disjointedly, gave rise to the Law. Stapp, Murphy, and Nichols were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of Engineering.

George Nichols will be part of a presentation by AIR editor Marc Abrahams, that asks the question “What’s It Take to Win an Ig Nobel Prize?” Historian Nick Spark, author of the most definitive account of the history of the history of Murphy’s law, will also take part.

The event will be at Beckman Auditorium, at 8:00 PM. It’s free. Details are presented here.