Improbable Research

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*radius?. Two 8 pizzas = 2*pi*(4)? = 32*pi square inches, One 12? pizza = pi*(6)? = 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.