Larry Shirley, modern champion of the science of eugenics, is a man of high standards: Shirley offers fix for bad parenting Sterilize irresponsible moms, dads, he says Charleston City Councilman Larry Shirley says the robbery of a downtown video store – allegedly by a band of kids, including one too young to be charged – […]
Month: September 2006
Six legs on the screen
The 2006 Insect Fear Film Festival was a fantastic success – thanks to all involved! So say the festival organizers. (Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)
The Inertia of Barbie and Ken
Objective: This lesson is for primary students. The main objective of this mini-teach is for students to learn and understand what inertia is. They will learn the difference between inertia for objects at rest and objects moving in a straight line. Materials Needed: Two dolls (Barbie & Ken), two carts (skates, skate board) Strategy: Place […]
Warning: Truth’s irrelevancy?
Water without hydrogen would warrant warnings Signs at park air phony hazard The signs at the cascading pools in Waterfront Park are meant to frighten: They proclaim in bold letters, “danger” and “high levels of hydrogen.” But the warnings are bogus. The water in the fountain pools is, like all water, made of two-thirds hydrogen […]
Vermont teen gets a head
Teen Who Cut Off Corpse’s Head To Make Bong Sentenced Friends Say Buckalew Told Them He Did It Out Of Boredom The teen reportedly told friends that he planned to leave the head outside to dry and would then bleach it, a police affidavit said. The witnesses said his plan was to turn the skull […]
A catalogue of errors
How many books written in seemingly obscure languages are misfiled and languishing unfindable in libraries? Joyce Flynn’s experience at Harvard suggests the answer is: a lot. Flynn, a researcher in Celtic languages, discovered some common mishaps that no one discusses much…. So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
September mini-AIR
The September issue of mini-AIR just went out (late, due to our switchover to new distribution software). It features a fresh batch of professor-professors, song-lodging statistics, the story of academic bad breath, and other things. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It?s […]
Go for the hair
If you don’t have time to properly evaluate an investment opportunity, just use the Hair Rule: any investment in a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is a guaranteed success. So says the mildly elusive editor of the web site valleywag, citing as an example a man who is not a member […]
Onians and the inner head
Creating a brand new academic discipline ? neuroarthistory ? Prof John Onians uses the results from new scanning techniques to answer questions such as: What happens in the brain of the modern artist as he or she works? ? What happened in the brain of an artistic genius like Leonardo Da Vinci? So says a […]
An all-natural Michael Jackson
A one-minute video shows a bird with skill that equals or surpasses that of Michael Jackson when Jackson was in his prime. Kees Moeliker, our European Bureau Chief who is also curator of birds at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, says: It is the Red-capped manakin (Pipra mentalis) which occurs in humid forests from SE […]