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 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.
“Ode on the Mammoth Cheese” gained new prominence when John W. Trinkaus accepted his Ig Nobel Literature Prize in 2003. Trinkaus was presented with a special framed copy of the famous 1884 cheese poem, a copy signed by four Nobel Laureates. Read about it in the Nov/Dec 2003 issue of the magazine, or read it (and see the magic moment) here.
Investigators Golson and LaVin express their feelings about Sidebottom’s classic ‘Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods’:
INVESTIGATOR STEVE GOLSON
Said Olsen, Sidebottom, and Knight,
“Messy kitchens fill us with delight!
All the insects and germs,
And those lovely hookworms!
Is our book about filth? Yes, that’s right!”
INVESTIGATOR ANNE LaVIN:
Do you hunt for small bits of critters
in cookies or french fries or fritters?
Sidebottom’s advice
About roaches and lice
Helps prevent those post-bug-eating jitters.
These two new Filth-in-Foods paeans are part of an ongoing project that was introduced in mini-AIR 2004-01.
See the previous selection of Filth-in-Food paeans here.
Dr. David Notkin and his fully robust beard have joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). You can see Dr. Notkin’s photograph and credentials at the LFHCfS home page.
NOTICE: All LFHCfS member who will be in the Seattle area on Friday night, February 13, are invited to come to the Improbable Research Show, at the Sheraton Hotel, in the Metropolitan Ballroom, at 8:00 PM, so that the public will have a chance to admire their hair.
One’s aspirations can kill - if Dr Sakae Inouye, of Otsuma Women’s University in Tokyo, is correct - and Chinese aspirations are particularly deadly.
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian. Read it here.
Here are two new Filth-in-Foods paeans. They were composed in tribute to Sidebottom’s classic ‘Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods.’ These paeans are part of an ongoing project that was introduced in mini-AIR 2004-01.
INVESTIGATOR HEATHER HEWITT:
Olsen, Sidebottom, and Knight
Endeavor to help shine a light
On what makes food dirty:
Regarding food pure’ty,
The “five second rule” isn’t right.
INVESTIGATOR DAVID WEINBERGER:
The book by Sidebottom is lunch-
Time reading for a scary bunch
Who look into their meal
With a bug-eyéd zeal
And savor its every crunch.
The most nanoscopically sweeping and comprensive — and according to some critics, the most impassioned — Nano-Lecture delivered at the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was by Eric Lander, on the topic THE GENOME. See it here. This is the fifth of the five Nano-Lectures weve posted.
All five of the Nano-Lectures can be heard on NPR Science Friday’s archived broadcast of the ceremony. Hear it here.
(NOTE: If you have a suggestion for someone who would be a splendid Nano-Lecturer at the 2004 ceremony (which will be held Thursday evening, September 30, at Harvard University), please let us know.)
Perhaps the most definitionally piercing Nano-Lecture delivered at the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was by Harvard College senior Genevieve Reynolds, on the topic EDUCATION. See it here. This is the fourth of the five Nano-Lectures we’ll be posting.
The new version of Portfolio of a Genius has just arrived. For the better part of a decade, we have been receiving the laboriously crafted, increasingly thick versions of this wondrous work. They arrive in our mailbox at the post office, always unanticipated, always surprising by their very existence.
The author, James E. Shepherd, Jr. — the subject and author of the Portfolio — switched from paper to CD a few years ago, perhaps at the request of the heavily burdened postal workers of the world.
Each new paper version was thicker than its predecessor, and weightier, too. “Mighty thick and mighty heavy” would be a good way to describe the later pre-CD incarnations.
The CD versions are of course svelter, but also fuller than ever with documentation of the life, and correspondence, and especially the correspondence about the corresponence, of Mr. Shepherd. Each new version contains all that was in its predecessors, and also copies of all correspondence sent and received pertaining thereto.
A web version now exists; you can see it here. We are intending to schedule time to schedule time to begin to read it some day. Perhaps you will, too.
‘This study assessed the effects of the odour and ingestion of garlic bread on family interactions.” With those opening words, Alan R Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, in Chicago, Illinois, declared the purpose and the breadth of his research.
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian. Read it here.
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