Improbable Research

Investigator Teresa Wilcox writes:

I have long admired the reporting of your man Emil Filterbag. Viva Filterbag! This is probably pointless, but I thought you should know that if you go to the (to me) very strange web site maamumiaa.tripod.com/index59.html, you will find the phrase "email filter bag." As I said, I thought you should know this.

Investigator Marc Sadowsky writes:

“I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the author Not Available. Amazon.com has figured out I’m a big fine of his (more likely hers) and has notified me of his/her latest book. Here is their letter:”

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition with CD-ROM and Online Subscription by Merriam-Webster, also purchased books by Not Available. For this reason, you might like to know that Not Available’s National Geographic Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition (National Geographic Atlas of the World) will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 32% by following the link below.

Dr. Judith Reisman, whom we profiled recently, is now reported to be in a new sex-fueled frenzy.

Some time right after our profile appeared, Dr. Reisman’s online collection of wonderfully explicit dirty pictures, which she produced so that the public could recognize what to avoid looking at, was removed from her web site. Or perhaps she has not removed the collection. It is possible that Dr. Reisman has  covered it up, or perhaps she has moved it to a less prominent part of her web site. In the latter case, you will have to go digging to find it.

This may or may not be part of the aforementioned new frenzy. To learn about that, read a report in the November 22, 2004 issue of the Washington Post. Here is a taste of that report, which was written by Alan Cooperman. It describes a campaign being mounted by self-admittedly moral groups who say they deplore the new film about sex research pioneer Alfred C. Kinsey:

Prominent among them is Judith Reisman, author of the 1991 book
"Kinsey, Sex and Fraud." Citing her work, Concerned Women for America,
the nation’s largest women’s group, has encouraged its members to go to
theaters and politely hand out leaflets that accuse Kinsey, who died in
1956, of committing child sexual abuse as well as scientific fraud.
…
Reisman noted that she had seen only the first 15 minutes of the film
because the producers cut off a private screening in Los Angeles as
soon as they learned she was in the audience. But she said she closely
followed the movie’s filming and was certain it was "a coverup."

Dr. Reisman is trying to draw attention to the new movie. We wish her well, and hope, for her sake, that she succeeds in her efforts.

The Bureaucracy Club is proud to welcome to its ranks the Bureaucracy Club of Copenhagen.

Investigator Matthias Ehrgott writes:

Universities put some pressure on their academics to get research (improbable or otherwise) published. In most countries/continents there exist Journals using that countries/continents name, such as
Journal of the American Mathematical Society. Recently someone (in India!) discovered that the mathematical community of an entire continent lacks a journal, so he launched The Antarctic Journal of Mathematics.