Improbable Research

The June issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Peanut Butter Research; Classification Classification Problem; Video Poker for the Master; Rhomboid Intramembrane Protease Poets; Ant Crowding Competition; The Secret to Success; Newest Hairy Scientists & Professor-Professors; Waffles and Age; Morals, Doppelgangers, Secrets, Deception, Bulb Interpretation, Steps, Fat.

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Because things are only in perspective when compared to a dump truck.

So says Zoologix, about a chart that compares the lengths of a blue whale, a giant quid, a colossal squid, and a dump truck.

(Thanks to investigator Russell Zenakis for bringing this to our attention.)

Peanut butter is being turned into diamonds by scientists with a technique that harnesses pressures higher than those found at the centre of the earth. Edinburgh University experts say the feat is made possible by squeezing the paste between the tips of two diamonds creating a “stiletto heel effect”. The scientists also revealed they can turn oxygen into red crystals using the same method. Demonstrations take place at Royal Society exhibition shows from 2 July.

So says a June 27, 2007 BBC report, which features a picture of peanuts in their pre-compressed state.

Implications are not fully known — but the effects of peanut butter on the rotation of the earth were documented long ago.

Carl Philips, Brian Guenzel and Paul Bergen are hopping mad about bad metaphors. Writing in the Journal of Harm Reduction, they pull on their imaginary boxing gloves.

Stepping into the ring, so to speak, they declare: “Anti-harm-reduction advocates sometimes resort to pseudo-analogies to ridicule harm reduction. Those opposed to the use of smokeless tobacco as an alternative to smoking sometimes suggest that the substitution would be like jumping from a three-storey building rather than a 10-storey, or like shooting yourself in the foot rather than the head.”

Following their summary of these two disagreeable analogies, Philips, Guenzel and Bergen proceed to administer a good thrashing….

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

Just as George Bush the American president has to contend with George Bush the neuroscientist (and vice versa) and other George Bush scientists, so now does Gordon Brown the new British prime minister have to contend with Gordon Brown the mathematician.

Here are two notable studies by Gordon Brown:

“A Remark on Semi-Simple Lie Algebras”
Gordon Brown
Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Aug., 1964), p. 518.

and

“A Class of Simple Lie Algebras of Characteristic Three”
Gordon Brown
Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 107, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 901-905.

For some George Bush science studies, see “MAY WE RECOMMEND: The Science of G. Bush“, elsewhere on the Improbable Research web site.

(NOTE TO MOLLIFY MATHEMATICIANS: The phrase “lie algebra” is usually pronounced as if the first word is spelled “lee”)

BEIJING (Reuters) - A group of Chinese reporters came up with a novel idea to test how greedy local hospitals were — pass off tea as urine samples and submit the drink for tests.

The results: six out of 10 hospitals in Hangzhou, the capital of the rich coastal province of Zhejiang, visited by the reporters over a two-day period this month concluded that the patients’ urinal tracts were infected.

Five of the hospitals prescribed medication costing up to 400 yuan ($50), the online edition of the semi-official China News Service (www.chinanews.com) said in a report seen on Wednesday….

Health Minister Gao Qiang has accused greedy hospitals of charging excessive fees and prescribing unnecessary and expensive medication.

So says a March 21, 2007 Reuters report.

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

We were pretty hungry and the pizza was cheap, so we ordered a 12″ round pizza for the two of us. (Pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, and onions, though the toppings are immaterial.) A little while later, the waitress came by with an 8″round pizza, explaining that another waitress had mistakenly given our pizza to someone else. She said we could have this 8″pizza now, and she’d have the cook throw another 8″pizza in the oven for us. She claimed that we’d be getting more total pieces of pizza, so this was a good deal for us. After doing some quick mental math (area of a circle = pi*radius². Two 8 pizzas = 2*pi*(4)² = 32*pi square inches, One 12″ pizza = pi*(6)² = 36*pi square inches), I told her we’d be missing out on over 12 square inches of pizza, so we’d rather just have the one 12″pizza.

So writes Matt the pizza lover.

(Thanks to investigator Cam Decker for bringing this to our attention.)

Here’s handy info to have. One never knows when one might find oneself in the situation described by Philip Ball in his May 18, 2007 report in Nature:

How to survive in a black hole

So there you are: you discover that your spaceship has inadvertently slipped across the event horizon of a black hole — the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the hole’s fearsome gravity. The only question is how you can maximize the time you have left. What do you do?

A common idea in physics is that you shouldn’t try to blast your way out of there. Black holes, it’s said, are like the popular view of quicksand: the harder you struggle, the worse things become.

But Geraint Lewis and Juliana Kwan of the University of Sydney in Australia say this is a myth. Their analysis of the problem, soon to be published in the/ Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, shows that in general your best bet is indeed to turn on the rocket’s engine. You’ll never escape, but you’ll live a little longer.

Falling into a black hole is a strange affair….

(Thanks to investigator Katherine Gleason for bringing this to our attention.)

We have studied magnetized billiards with Wedge and Pac-Man like geometries where rotational invariance is broken. We have considered different rational an [sic?] irrational angles for the billiards.

So says the abstract for a talk given March 21, 2000 by M. A. Gongora (of Northeastern University and the University of Mexico), J.V. Jose and S. Schaffner (of Northeastern), and P.H.E. Tiesinga (of the Salk Institute). The general subject: Nonequilibrium Quantum Phenomena - Theory.

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

Of 1,037 full- or part-time workers polled, 27 percent ranked disorganized, rambling meetings as their top frustration, followed by 17 percent who said they were annoyed by peers who interrupt and try to dominate meetings.

So says a May 2007 report by Inc. magazine. This great, measured discovery was made by a research firm called Opinion Research USA. Opinion Research USA boasts the slogan “Insight Beyond Measure.”

(Thanks to investigator John Rossheim for bringing this to our attention.)

Assuming that Jung had primary responsibility for the posing of the photograph, let me speculate regarding Freud’s response to this situation. Freud was generally uneasy about being photographed. For example, in his response to Jung’s request for his picture in 1907 (McGuire, p. 88) he wrote, “In the last fifteen years I have never willingly sat for a photographer, because I am too vain to countenance my physical deterioration.” In addition, Roazen (l975, p. 229) learned in an unpublished interview with Reik that Freud was particularly uncomfortable about his height relative to Jung’s. Therefore, it seems to me that Freud was somewhat uneasy during the photograph arrangement but, my guess is that he approved and was generally pleased at his artificially elevated placement in the center of the group, and was probably appreciative of Jung’s efforts.

Finally, there is a most interesting and telling epilogue to this event. Jones, in an unpublished letter to Freud in 1926, reveals that at the end of the conference Jung told him that someday he would stand higher than Freud. Jones recalls that he was shocked at this statement and asked Jung why he didn’t analyze his father complex (Donn, l988, p. l34).

So writes Professor Martin S. Fiebert in his study “Speculation Regarding the Posing of Freud in the Group Photograph at the Third International Psychoanalytic Congress.“

Carl Linnaeus paid attention to some surprising things. Linnaeus was the Swedish scientist who taught the world how to classify living things, and gave us the double-barrelled way of naming them in Latin. This year is the 300th anniversary of his birth. The science community celebrates most of his work, but tends to overlook some of his writings about Lapland. Of course, the world in general tends to overlook writings, or most anything else, about Lapland.

At the age of 25, Linnaeus travelled through that wild northern region for five months, noting down whatever caught his eye, ear or nose. His hodgepodge of jottings jumps from topic to unrelated topic. Some of his thoughts, appearing in print, may take modern readers unawares. Here are a few….

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

Hoorah for secrecy in museums! Decades ago, many murder mystery novels and movies took place in museums. A June 21, 2007 report in the Washington Post heralds a return of the museum as a place of skulduggery and, if we the public are lucky, murder. Under the leadership of its recently deposed director, the Smithsonian Institution reportedly fostered a good, old-fashioned climate of secrecy and impending doom. Here’s a snippet from that report:

Secrecy Pervaded Smithsonian on Small’s Watch

Leaders of the Smithsonian in the past seven years took extraordinary steps to keep secret the amount of top executives’ compensation, lavish expense-account spending, ethical missteps and management failures, an independent report released yesterday shows.

Former secretary Lawrence M. Small, with the help of his top deputy, Sheila P. Burke, took advantage of a vast gap in oversight to set his own salary, spend freely, take unlimited leave and ignore policy to pursue private agendas, according to the independent review committee…

Three cheers for former secretary Small! Maybe, just maybe, through force of personality, he has ushered in a new era of gripping, old-fashioned creepy museum murder mysteries…

…filled with intriguing character actors.

People are beating their heads and chests in support of this or that theory as to whether bicycle helmets do good or harm or both or neither. Here are two current items in the debate.

The truck ran over his head. “I didn’t see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.” His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb’s head was fine.

Madison Police Department Sgt. Chris Boyd said the officer at the scene urged Lipscomb to keep the helmet. He did. It is all flattened and mangled and broken, unlike his head.

So says a May 12, 2007 [Madison, Wisconsin] Capital Times report.

His findings, published in the March 2007 issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention, state that when Walker wore a helmet drivers typically drove an average of 3.35 inches closer to his bike than when his noggin wasn’t covered. But, if he wore a wig of long, brown locks— appearing to be a woman from behind—he was granted 2.2 inches more room to ride.

“The implication,” Walker says, “is that any protection helmets give is canceled out by other mechanisms, such as riders possibly taking more risks and/or changes in how other road users behave towards cyclists.”

So says May 2007 Scientific American report.

(Thanks to investigators Millie Aase and Thomas Holsinger, respectively, for bringing these to our attention.

UPDATE: Investigator Betsy Devine writes: “surely there’s a tie-in between the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) and the research result you quote that LFH is worth an extra 2.2 inches.”

Antonios Zampelis has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I am currently doing my research on implant and bone
biomechanics and hope to obtain a PhD thesis on the
subject.

Antonios Zampelis, DDS, MSc, LFHCfS
Periodontist, Specialized in Periodontics and Implant Therapy
Specialist Clinic for Periodontics
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)