Improbable Research

PeaceBang’s Beauty Tips for Ministers is the name of a blog. The blog is all about beauty tips for ministers. Here is one of them:

While we’re on the subject of clean cutting, fellas, I’m seeing FOOD IN BEARDS at collegial gatherings. I am seeing UNTRIMMED GOATEES. I am seeing SIDES OF ‘STACHES THAT DRIP INTO MOUTHS.

But is it possible to create an interactive impossible object, that is, an impossible object that can be viewed from any angle? This paper explores the creation of such objects on the computer.

So say Chih W. Khoh and Peter Kovesi in their paper “Animating Impossible Objects.”

(Thanks to investigator Mark Dionne for bringing this to our attention.)

At many universities, the departments keep a certain distance from each other. At one university this has always, and exactly been true. At the University of the Aegean, different departments are on different islands.

The sociology department is on Lesvos, 90 nautical miles distant from the maths department, which is on Samos….

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

Research into research can be improved

That’s the headline on a November 17, 2006 press release issued by the Karolinska Institute. The press release goes on to say:

The methods used to evaluate the quality of research can be far more accurate and far-reaching, according to a new doctoral thesis on bibliometrics from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “A common pitfall is that bibliometricians assess the average quality of journals instead of the individual scientific articles,” says PhD Jonas Lundberg.

Bibliometrics is used to describe and assess the quality of research, and to give an idea of the influence a research group or university has on a particular field. As research becomes all the more international and competition between researchers stiffens, more exacting systems are needed to assess the quality of research.

“I usually say that I research into research,” says Jonas Lundberg.

A woman who spent ten days in hospital after suffering from severe migraines had to extend her stay by 36 hours after a television set fell on her head.

Sharron Blake, 36, a mature student from Somerset was preparing to leave hospital when the TV, on an adjustable arm above her bed, crashed down. She suffered from mild concussion and was advised to stay in hospital for extra observation.

She said, “ I was in for severe migraines in the first place. I’m worried about who else it’ll happen to.”

So says a January 12, 2007 report in the Glasgow Daily Record.

(Thanks to investigator Adiyasa Dwitama for bringing this to our attention.)

Everybody wins but the short-legged anoles.

So writes John Hawks about an experiment conducted by J.B. Losos and some friends. Hawks goes on to say “this is an experiment where they basically let the velociraptors loose.”

Eco-friendly bra doubles as shopping bag

Lingerie manufacturer Triumph International Japan has unveiled a new type of brassiere that can be converted into a shopping bag. Called the “No! Shopping Bag Bra” (NO! reji-bukuro bra), the environmentally-friendly lingerie is designed to promote the reduction of pl

astic bag consumption, a key objective of the revised Containers and Packaging Recycling Law hammered out by Japanese lawmakers in June.

So reports the Pink Tentacle blog on November 8, 2006.

The Bagger 288 is a rather big machine.

(Thanks to investigator Fran Shea for bringing this to our attention.)

Squidsoap seems to be conducting a psychology experiment (details unspecified to the public) involving soap, red paint, children, a mantra (”Training Tomorrow’s Great Hand Washers”), and the viewers of a television commercial about all of the above.

Mousy off-flavour is one of the wine industry’s little embarrassments, and has been since at least the 1890s, when the concept first seeped into published documents. Few have written or spoken of it plainly.

Now a team of Australian food scientists is dishing the dirt on mousy off- flavour, with a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Suggesting that perhaps it will be adapted for the musical theatre, the report is called Mousy Off-flavour: A Review….

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

Inventions do, usually, have inventors. The death of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of ramen instant noodles, is a reminder that sometimes the very existence of an invention’s inventor goes generally unnoticed.

Like Daisuke Inoue, the inventor of karaoke (who went unrecognized for decades, but who in 2004 won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize — click here to listen to the NPR recording of his acceptance speech), Mr. Ando was surprisingly unknown to most of the people whose lives he affected. Mr. Ando was, in death, finally celebrated worldwide. A January 9, 2006 New York Times editorial expresses what many others also feel:

The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant….

 On Thursday, just after noon, the Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was arrested by Atlanta police as he crossed the middle of the street between the Hilton and Hyatt hotels. After being thrown on the ground and handcuffed, the former Oxford don was formally arrested, his hands cuffed behind his back. Several policemen pressed hard on his neck and chest, leaving the mild-mannered scholar, who’s never gotten so much as a parking ticket, bruised and in pain. He was then taken to the city detention center along with other accused felons and thrown into a filthy jail cell filled with prisoners. He remained incarcerated for eight hours…

In court even the prosecutors seemed embarrassed by the incident, which got out of hand when Fernandez-Armesto requested to see the policeman’s identification…. Officials finally agreed to drop all charges.
Professor Fernandez-Armesto provided HNN with a riveting account of his day in an Atlanta jail. We have broken the interview into several parts to make the download quicker.

So says a January 4, 2007 History News Network report, which contains links to video of Professor Armesto describing what happened.

(Thanks to investigator Terri Yardley for bringing this to our attention.)

Chef Andy’s Household Hint: Jell-O prepared with tonic water glows under black light, but tastes really awful. For a better way to make your Jell-O mold glow, try serving it on a glass plate with an activated cyanamid lightstick underneath. Works especially well with green food such as Ring-Around-the-Tuna.

So says Chef Andy, an amateur scientist who specializes in Jell-O (a substance known by other names in places other than Chef Andy’s home country).

Note: Jell-O was the substance involved in Ivette Bassa’s 1992 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize-winning research.

(Thanks to investigator David Brooks for bringing Chef Andy to our attention.)

Stephen Marquardt says he analyzes stunningly beautiful people mathematically.

(Thanks to investigator Anne Topley for bringing this to our attention.)

Beer goggles, so called, can be described in equation form (according to a November 25, 2005 BBC report that is still reverberating).

Beer goggles, so called, are apparently being built and offered for sale.

(Thanks to investigator Ralph DePietro for bringing the specs to our attention, and to investigator Joost Bonsen for reminding us about the equation.)