Improbable Research

Using sensors in underwear, scientists can accurately zero in on small everyday tasks.

That statement appears in a February 27, 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times.

(Thanks to Investigator Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.)

A tonsorial fashion analyzed (two aspects): (1) transformational geometry and iteration in cornrow hair styles; and (2) logarithmic curves in cornrow hairstyles.

Thanks to Investigators Larissa and Bob Reeve for bringing this and their own cornrows to our attention.)

In the United States, a country where everyone has a nodding acquaintance with learning, a prominent education thinker tried a daring experiment. Steve Nadis explains:

I always felt that kids who are cut off from television are kind of out of it in a quaint, Amish sort of way. Which is why I’ve trained my children to become good TV watchers — or at least I’d thought they were trained as such. But now the strategy has appeared to backfire as my three-year-old is in open revolt. One night over the weekend we watched a family video (something about a dog?) and the next night the women’s figure skating on the Olympics (which I’d taped the night before). The next night, as we were getting ready for bedtime, my youngest upstart remarked: “I hope we don’t have to watch another movie tonight. That’s boring!” Instead, I was forced to read her a book before bed, all the while feeling like a total, unmitigated failure as a parent. So I ask you (at the risk of repeating myself): What’s the matter with kids today?

Lots of people, not just U.S. government employees, are having profitable fun talking about lie detectors. Alice Shirrell Kaswell of our staff reports that intrepid inventor and scientific superman Britton Chance is working on one. In an article in OE Magazine, he describes his hand-held cogno-sensor. He also describes himself, with characteristic modesty:

Sitting in his office at the University of Pennsylvania, Britton Chance could easily just rest on his laurels, content. Words like “legend” come to mind.

But what else do you call a man who fished with Ernest Hemingway and has the stuffed marlin to prove it, who patented

Read the rest of this entry »

There exists a video of a kinder, gentler table saw and a hot dog.

Note that you have to replace the blade and the brake cartridge whenever it is set off.

(Thanks to Investigator Mark Dionne for bringing the note, if not the hotdog or the saw, to our attention.)

What do Joe Navarro, M.A., and John R. Schafer, M.A. say the FBI says about detecting that hard-to-define thing called deception? It’s a long story, and it’s in the July 2001 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The fundamental thing, the possible key to it all, they imply, is this:

When individuals tell the truth, they often make every effort to ensure that other people understand. In contrast, liars attempt to manage others’ perceptions.

Investigator Gary Dryfoos identifies a new trend in organic food, commenting “I have absolutely nothing to add to this, except perhaps extra sauce.” Details are in a February 17, 2006 in The Telegraph:

On the menu today: horse penis and testicles with a chilli dip

The menu at Beijing’s latest venue for its growing army of gourmets is eye-watering rather than mouth-watering.

China’s cuisine is renowned for being “in your face” - from the skinned dogs displayed at food markets to the kebabbed scorpions sold on street stalls - and there is no polite way of describing Guo-li-zhuang.

Situated in an elegantly restored house beside Beijing’s West Lake, it is China’s first speciality penis restaurant.

The news article has photographs, which are not reproduced here.

Investigator Ian Davis writes [from Melbourne, Australia]:

I don’t think I even begin to understand the full import of this editorial, let alone the article, but can anyone argue with my conclusion that God must have a great sense of humor? As if the giraffe and the platypus were not proof enough.

The editorial [or whatever it is], in the February 23, 2006 issue of Nature, begins:

To compute or not to compute?
by Jonathan P. Dowling

Quantum physics aims another blow at common sense: a simple quantum computer gives the right answer, even when it is not run. (Traditionalists be comforted: the computer must be turned on.) Is it possible to get a sensible answer from a computer without even running a program? Yes indeed, report Hosten et al. on page 949
of this issue — and they have the experimental proof. The thread that leads thus far has its origin in the early 1990s, with the introduction of a quantum paradox known as…

The article is called “Counterfactual quantum computation through quantum interrogation.”

An Australian firm which is said to be located in Chatswood, New South Wales, and which may be called “O18″, and which perhaps exists, advertises a triumph of reverse engineering:

CHILLED DRINKING WATER

O18 uses our award winning ‘pressure chilling’ to extract the purest water from Australian fruit. Every drop is filtered through fruit — so O18 is the most naturally purified water on earth.

Thanks to Investigator Denise Braley for bringing this to our attention.)

Kees Moeliker, our European Bureau Chief, reports the latest about leaden sparrow research. (This is related only distantly to Jonathan Corum’s Python-inspired reseach report “Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow.”) Moeliker writes:

Ramallah, a city on the West Bank (Palestinian Authority) known best from the Israel-Palestinian conflict, was also the study area of K.M. Swaileh and R. Sansur, both researchers at the Birzeit University. They captured some house sparrows (under license from Palestinian Ministry for Environmental Affairs) from the Ramallah streets, and - as reported in their paper “Monitoring urban heavy metal pollution using the House Sparrow“, in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (vol. 8, 2006, pp. 209-13): “birds were sacrified, put in plastic bags and deep-frozen for later analysis.” Subsequently the sparrows were dissected, various tissue samples were digested in super-pure nitric and perchloric acids, and analysed. Their results “provide some evidence for the potential of the house sparrow as a biomonitor for urban heavy metal pollution.” It should be noted that leaded fuel was still used in the Palestinian Territories at the time of the study.

Dirt is on the minds of legislators in the American state of Georgia. Georgia Assembly bill #1443, co-sponsorted by six legislators, comes with the official description:

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Article 3 of Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to state symbols, so as to designate Georgia red clay as Georgia’s official dirt; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

(Thanks to Investigator Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)

How many mathematicians have beards?

If you want a rough approximation, survey the Oberwolfach Photo Collection of mathematicians. Do so before anyone else does, and you will be the first scholar to have accomplished this task in this way.

Olga Gurova studies the cultural history of underwear in the Soviet Union. “When I am talking about Soviet underwear,” she says, “I mean the underwear that appeared after the 1917 revolution.”

Dr Gurova is based at European University in St Petersburg. During the 2005-06 academic year she is visiting the US. Her lectures and writings are helping to fill the information gap that developed during the cold war….

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

ABC News reports (on February 22, 2006) a further discovery by the team that won the 2005 Ig Nobel Biology Prize:

Smelly Frogs Don’t Get Insect Bites

Researchers have found that some Australian frogs create their own insect repellent, resembling rotten meat and others roasted cashew nuts or thyme leaves.

The research team, which includes Associate Professor Mike Tyler of the University of Adelaide and entomologist Dr Craig Williams from James Cook University, has published its findings online in the journal Biology Letters….

To honor National Pancake Day, a February 22, 2006 Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World report remindingly raises and answers the baseline question:

How flat?: Research completed in 2003 proved what U.S. Interstate 70 drivers have suspected all along — that Kansas is flatter than a pancake.

Researchers from Southwest Texas State and Arizona State universities analyzed the ups and downs of a flapjack and compared them with those of the state. The results were published in the Annals of Improbable Research.