Improbable Research

Nobody sleeps alone. This has little or nothing to do with morals. It is simply a law of nature, a fact. Census after census finds that, with or without the niceties of formal marriage, dust mites are the great silent majority in every bed….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian

Today’s entry in our ongoing series "Real or Concocted?" is a press release purportedly issued by the University of Buffalo. Here are excerpts:

Results showed that in the first year of marriage for 20-somethings, husbands are more likely to start or resume smoking marijuana if their wives smoke marijuana. … [Husbands] do not seem to influence their wives’ marijuana smoking. …

Previous research by [the same researchers] found that husbands’ drinking influenced wives’ drinking during the first year of marriage. However, from the first to second year, wives’ drinking influenced husbands’ drinking.

The research is purportedly funded by an organization calling itself The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

"‘Toll House’ Recipe Cookies Do Not Maintain Their Morphology Under Heat Stress Conditions." That’s the claim. It is also the title of a research report by Michael Cammer that appears in the July/August issue of the  Annals of Improbable Research.

The achievement that won the 2000 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the British Royal Navy is now being repeated by the British Army. A report in the July 17, 2005 issue of The Daily Telegraph tells latest chapter:

Soldiers forced to shout ‘bang’ as the Army runs out of ammunition
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent

Soldiers are facing the undignified prospect of being forced to shout "bang, bang" on military training exercises after an admission by the Army that it is running out of blank ammunition….

We describe an experiment in which a Giant African Snail, acting as a data transfer agent, exceeded all known “last-mile” communications technologies in terms of bit-per-second performance, adding to the many paradoxes of broadband communications modules.

So begins a report called "Sluggish Data Transport Is Faster Than ADSL," by Ami Ben-Bassat, Revital Ben-David-Zaslow, Shimon Schocken and Yossi Vardi. They build upon earlier work with pigeons. The report appears in the July/August issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.

Investigator Verena Wieloch writes about the photosynthesis-related phenomenon called "feedback de-excitation quenching":

"Isn’t ‘feedback de-excitation quenching’ when someone rains on your parade?"

Govindarajan Venkatesh, who sometimes goes by the name Venkatesh Govindarajan, is the author of "Cricketing Surnames, Very Proper Common Nouns," wherein he reveals that:

Of all the men (alive and deceased) who have represented their
respective countries in the international arena right from when the
first ball was bowled in the very first Test Match held in Melbourne,
there are over 270 players who have/had surnames which are ‘very
common’ Proper Nouns.

Two inventors at Microsoft have been granted a patent (US #6,913,466) for a method of "training a trainee to analyze media, such as music."

Some observers find it intriguing that "The process includes an initial tutorial and a double grooving process." But double grooving is a standard engineering procedure, for which there are established double groove cut specifications.

(Thanks to Gillian Forman for bringing this to our attention.)

Which side is which? Which dominates the other? These are questions faced regularly by readers and writers of the journal  Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain, and Cognition. 2002 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Chris McManus of University College London is one of the journal’s editors.

(Thanks to 2000 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Richard Wassersug for bringing this journal to our attention.)

Almost nothing is more romantic than a mathematical theorem - if that theorem is stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift during a perilous sea voyage in wartime, and if the person who wrote it is one of the world’s top mathematicians. Shizuo Kakutani, who died last August, threw many such bottles into the ocean more than 60 years ago. Their fate is a complete mystery….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian

For what it’s worth, there is now a quasi-nifty poster (in downloadable PDF format) for this year’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office lists complaints they have received about would-be invention promoters.

"Legends of forgetting" is a short film by M. Jourdan Atkinson of Texas Southern University, who says it is  "a documentary about displaced histories, fantasies, and artifacts emanating from a farm site in the Southwestern Missouri." A still photo from the video shows a carving of an animal which, says Atkinson, has never been properly identified.  Anderson wrote an accompanying background paper.

Thanks to Mike Stanfill of the Infinite Cats Project, you can see quickly and simply –  movingly — the basic idea of recursion.

[NOTE: The Infinit Cats project was featured in the special Cats Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.]

Professor Steven Mithen of Reading University also thinks the cave- dwellers would have enjoyed the rhythms and sounds made by rap artists.

So says a June 30, 2005 BBC News report about Professor Mithen and his new book, The Singing Neanderthal : The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.

(Thanks to Remo Tamayo for bringing this to our attention.)