Improbable Research

How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a Tootsie-Pop?

Mark Robertshaw asks and, to some degree, answers the question. His spare, disciplined approach — carefully counting something, but not over-interpreting what it might mean — is reminiscent of the approach made famous by Ig Nobel Prize winner John Trinkaus.

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

To drink really hot coffee (or hot tea) is to swallow a paradox of pleasure and pain. Hye-Seong Lee, Earl Carstens and Michael O’Mahony, at the University of California, Davis, solved the puzzle, more or less. They explain it in a study, which, for the sake of clarity and directness, they call: Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?…

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

Bill Plympton’s animated “How to Kiss” is definitive, or nearly so on the matter.

So too is his “Notice How Smoking Ages You,” and “Your Face,”

(Thanks to foganazos for bringing these and other Plympton works to our attention.)

The training device, created by Janssen L.P., is a rig with earphones and goggles that plunges the wearer into the mind of a serious schizophrenic. The system offers two interactive scenarios. In one, you’re riding a bus in which other riders appear and disappear, birds of prey claw at the windows, and voices hiss, “He’s taking you back to the FBI!” The other features a trip to the drugstore, where the pharmacist seems to be handing you poison instead of pills, and hostile customers stare at you in disgust.

Developed with psychiatrists and endorsed by advocates for the mentally ill, Virtual Hallucinations is being used by law enforcement, corrections, and health care professionals

So says a May 22, 2007 article in Wired News.

UC Davis has a competing, or at least parallel system for creating virtual hallucinations. Here are some of the hallucinations it is said to have created:

• Voices give a running commentary, telling the patient that he is worthless, fat, and that he should kill himself.

• Bagpipe music that periodically starts and ends abruptly.

• The text of a poster in the entrance morphs to spell derogatory words.

(Thanks to investigator Jane Kohner for bringing the Janssen device to our attention.)

One goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.

So wrote Theodore Dalrymple in a 2003 essay in City Journal

Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics

Mary Rosh thinks the world of John R. Lott Jr, the controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar whose book “More Guns, Less Crime” caused such a stir a few years ago.

In postings on Web sites in this country and abroad, Rosh has tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics. He is a meticulous researcher, she’s repeatedly told those who say otherwise. He’s not driven by the ideology of the left or the right. Rosh has even summoned memories of the classes she took from Lott a decade ago to illustrate Lott’s probity and academic gifts.

“I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had,” Rosh gushed in one Internet posting.

Indeed, Mary Rosh and John Lott agree about nearly everything.

Well they should, because Mary Rosh is John Lott — or at least that’s the pseudonym he’s used for three years to defend himself against his critics in online debates, Lott acknowledged this week.

So says a February 1, 2003 Washington Post report.

(Thanks to investigator Nancy Obert for bringing this to our attention.)

What is a gerbe? A gerbe is a mathematical object. It happens to be pretty obscure. Many obscure concepts are easy to understand. One just needs (A) a little patience, and (B) a reminder that most ideas are built upon other ideas. So it is, perhaps, with the gerbe.

To grasp a new concept, just (C) find a concept upon which it is built, and then (D) grasp that earlier concept. To grasp the earlier concept, just (E) find an appropriate earlier concept, and then (F) grasp it. And so on.

A few years ago, Nigel Hitchin used this technique to explain the concept of a gerbe….

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

The perfume, which has been blended by Manchester based ID Aromatics for the SCMA, re-creates the earthy and fruity aroma of Blue Stilton cheese in an eminently wearable perfume. Using grape seed as a carrier oil, the Stilton scent features a symphony of natural base notes including Yarrow, Angelica seed, Clary Sage and Valerian

The smell of a Stilton is essential to the grading of the cheese as it enables the grader to determine whether the cheese is up to the mark and able to be sold as Stilton.

So says a May 10, 2007 press release issued by the Stilton Cheese Makers Association.

Physicist Frank Tipler uses physics to prove Christianity.

A quasi-anonymous physics uses physics to prove Islam.

Have other physicists used physics to prove other religions? If so, we would like to hear about it.

(Thanks to investigators Lee Rossi and Andrea Lacan for bringing these to our attention.)

The cost of addiction is $5000 per month. We learn this from a June 21, 2007 Associated Press report that both identifies a newly recognized form of addiction, and gives an instance of its pricing:

When she suggested to therapists that Michael had a video game addiction, “nobody was familiar with it,” she said. “They all pooh-poohed it.”

Last fall, the family found a therapist who “told us he was addicted, period.” They sent Michael to a therapeutic boarding school, where he has spent the past six months - at a cost of $5,000 monthly that insurance won’t cover, his mother said.

The AP report identifies this is all part of a larger, bolder effort:

The culprit isn’t alcohol or drugs. It’s video games, which for certain kids can be as powerfully addictive as heroin, some doctors contend.

A leading council of the nation’s largest doctors’ group wants to have this behavior officially classified as a psychiatric disorder.

Ricardo A. Tejeiro Salguero (at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Algeciras)and Rosa M. Bersabé Morán (at Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain) have been doggedly on the trail of this for years now. Witness their study:

“Measuring problem video game playing in adolescents,” Ricardo A. Tejeiro Salguero, Rosa M. Bersabé Morán, Addiction, Volume 97 Issue 12 Page 1601-1606, December 2002.

Which brave researcher(s) will get the official credit for first declaring that video game playing is an addiction? The world waits, breathlessly, to find out.

(Thanks to investigator Kristine Danowski for bringing the AP report to our attention.)

According to Chester Spell, an associate professor of management at the Rutgers School of Business—Camden, the lunar settlements of tomorrow – or, for that matter, the space stations of today – carry long-term implications for the mental health of employees….

Spell presented his research about the mental health implications of working in a lunar settlement during the Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlements, held in New Brunswick during June 3-8.

So says a June 22, 2007 press release from Rutgers University.

(Thanks to investigator Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.)

Question: Who coined the phrase “conceptually simple new complexity indices”?

Answer (to the best of our knowledge): Steven H. Bertz and Toby J. Sommer, in the study “Rigorous Mathematical Approaches to Strategic Bonds and Synthetic Analysis Based on Conceptually Simple New Complexity Indices,” published in the journal Chemical Communications in the year 1997.

Physicist John Page brings beer to work. For him, the bubbly beverage is a perfect medium for demonstrating a scientific technique pioneered by his group at the University of Manitoba.

Page is a leading expert on the use of multiply scattered acoustic waves to study changes in physical systems and the movement of particles through a medium, in this case bubbles in a glass of beer.

The work builds or bubble upon the research that was honored with the 2002 Ig Nobel Physics prize:

Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: "Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]

So says an August 1, 2007 press release from the University of Manitoba.

(Thanks to investigator Kelly Price for bringing this to our attention.)

‘I didn’t eat and I didn’t sleep’
Coin dealer flies dime worth $1.9 million to NYC

John Feigenbaum flew out of San Jose this week in first class, with flip-flops on his feet, a T-shirt on his back and a dime worth $1.9 million in his pocket.

It was the most expensive dime ever to pass through San Jose. That’s because it is the most expensive dime in the history of dimes.

“All the way across the country I didn’t sleep,” Feigenbaum said. “I didn’t eat and I didn’t sleep. You wouldn’t, either.”

Feigenbaum is a rare coin dealer, and the dime he was carrying across the country, from San Jose to New York, is an 1894-S dime, one of only nine known to exist, and one of only 24 known to be coined that year in San Francisco.

So says a July 26, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle report.

Nothing is more ubiquitous in Beijing than the brigades of bao’an — the rent-a-cops in their off-teal floppy uniforms guarding (to use a verb loosely) the entrances and exits to apartment buildings, stores, construction sites, restaurants, offices, tourist sites, parks, markets, public urinals, random trees, and the occasional “lone wolf” bao’an standing at attention somewhere for no particular reason at all. Crouching under umbrellas or hiding in hastily constructed guard posts, they watch vigilantly for… I’m not really sure what.

So writes the author of the passage.

Security guards in China may follow the same principles described by Peter Freundlich in his study “Assessing Gluteal Hardness in Security Guards.” The study appeared in the special Security Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.