Improbable Research

The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. It features cricket poets, swarming business consultants, and other things.

Get ready for the Second Annual World Naked Gardening Day (WNGD)! People across the globe are encouraged, on Saturday, September 9, 2006 to tend their portion of the world’s garden clothed as nature intended.

So says the official web site for the event.

(Thanks to investigator Bob Frenay for alerting us to the nature of this temperate zone eventuality.)

The Kinsey Institute is seeking volunteers for an apparently abstruse experiment, Jerome Cerny‘s Labial Clip Comparison Study. Here are the publicly advertised details:

Clip comparison study

Principle Investigator: Jerome Cerny, PhD

Experimentors: Jenny Finkel, Nicole Prause

Instruments used: labial clip, photoplethysmograph, portapres, pneumotrace, subjective lever, videos (some sexual), questionnaires

Duration of session: 2 hours

Payment: $15 by check approx two weeks later

Prerequisite?: yes, please inquire

An historic meeting, small but memorable, occurred in Harvard Square on July 24, 2006. Helen Fisher — president of The American Nudist Research Library and winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Literature Prize — met Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb (Nobel Chemistry Prize, 1976) for a cup of coffee.

Fisher had been unable to attend the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony because of hurricanes (yes, hurricanes plural) descending on her home in Florida. On that occasion her daughter, Pamela Chestak, came to the ceremony and accepted the prize on behalf of her mother.
The photo shown here documents Fisher’s first visit to Cambridge as an Ig Nobel Prize winner. Lipscomb, who took part in the 2004 ceremony, expressed delight at being able, at long last, to shake hands with the honoree.

Investigator Abigail Tinker writes:

Here is a phrase/acronym that I just learned: DRE. Maybe you are already familiar with this maybe not — either way I think it should come into frequent use.

Let me relate the scene: We are in the conference room talking about a report that we have to submit in exactly one week and that there is about three weeks worth of work to do on it. We are talking about whether to include a price for one item in our financial model. Tom says I think we should at least put $3 per ton in. Fred says okay, fine, but where did that number come from? Tom (who is the most senior person I work with mind you) says oh that was a straight up DRE. When I look quizzical he elaborates what that stands for: Direct Rectal Extraction.

Apparently, while people are watching television rather than walking around, they take fewer steps than they would if they were walking around rather than watching television.

So claims a daring study published yesterday, July 27, 2006, online in the American Journal of Public Health. The report couches things in slightly technical language:

In multivariable analyses, each hour of television viewing on an average day was associated with 144 fewer steps per day and a decreased likelihood of accumulating 10000 steps per day.

A press release issued by the Dana Farber Cancer Institute explains it for laypersons, under the headline “Study suggests TV-watching lowers physical activity.”

(Thanks to investigator Sam Ripley for bringing this to our attention.)