Improbable Research

Question: Recently I read something about ?powdered water.? I wonder whether you have information regarding its use on a golf course.
…P. W., CALIFORNIA

Answer: It seems that the National Cash Register Company has been successful in producing powdered water for industrial use. The powder is manufactured by coating tiny particles of water with gelatin. Although dry to the touch, the powder can easily be crushed or dissolved to a liquid state. The producer is adapting the technique to coat bank deposit slips and other forms - so that carbon copies can be made without the use of carbon paper. Science has indeed made some unusual advances in recent years. However, thq practical use of ?powdered water? on the golf course
seems to be many years away if it is in the future at all.

This exchange appeared in the July 1963 issue of the USGA Green Section Record.

Investigator Michael Storch alerts us to an upcoming seminar:

SPACE-TIME GEOMETRY, RANDOM MATRICES, AND AIRPLANE BOARDING

We analyse airplane boarding times. We attach to the boarding process a Lorentzian metric defined on the unit square which depends on parameters of the boarding process such as airline boarding policy, distance between rows, number of passengers per row and average aisle length occupied by passenger. … The model describes the asymptotics for an infinite number of passengers while realistic numbers are 100-200 passengers per aisle. … When passengers become a bit thicker there is another transition in which previously good airline policies become bad and vice versa. As it turns out, airline policies are implicitly designed for cardboard thin passengers while actual passengers are on the other side of the phase transition.

The lecturer is Dr. Eitan Bachmat, who is the world’s worst storage systems researcher. It all happens Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 13:00 at the Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University. And there’s a nifty downloadable, er, flier.

“Regional Patterns of Salt Lake Morphology in the Lower Yarra Yarra Drainage System of Western Australia,” by D.A. Boggs, G.S. Boggs, I. Eliot, B. Knott, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 64, 2006, pp. 97?115.

Author D.A. Boggs resides in Humpty Doo, N.T., Australia.

(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)

“Who would not be just a bit curious about the identity of one’s reviewers, whether kind or cruel?” said Gail L. Shivel, a lecturer in English at the University of Miami and associate editor of Menckeniana, in an e-mail interview. She said that many people will soon be “opening up old reviews they have received, especially negative ones, to see if they can find out who wrote them.

How do you penetrate the secret? Details are in an April 21, 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education article called “Microsoft Word’s Hidden Tags Reveal Once-Anonymous Peer Reviewers.”

Yes, yes, yes, you can judge a book by its cover, argue Ronald AMP Piters and Mia JW Stokmans of Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. This is not just an opinion. Piters and Stokmans performed an experiment. Their results showed that “77% of all covers were classified correctly”….

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