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.)