Improbable Research

If you are not consuming the head of your Thanksgiving Turkey, you may consider the ‘Freeze Dry Service’ offered by Hazel Creek Inc. of Green Castle, Missouri. Here is the procedure:

Cut head off and freeze as quickly as possible.
Freeze heads in a small amount of water in a Ziploc bag.
Place heads in a trash bag and triple bag or ship in a disposable water tight container.
Put in a box and insulate with newspapers. (It is very important to make sure your package does not leak as it thaws)
Ship your head Next Day Air UPS.
Please enclose a packing list with your heads. Name, address, phone #, and complete list of heads and positions.

*If your heads are sent fresh and frozen, the quality of your heads will be noticeably better.

*If we receive your heads brown and thawed, you are going to lose a lot of detail and quality, and possibly epidermis slippage.

*If leaking during shipment there is a good possibility that the shipping company will throw your package away to prevent damage to other customers packages.

Remember to choose in which position you wish to have your head(s) returned: strut, flared strut, half strut, running, running open mouth, standing alert, walking, fighting, roosting, gobbling, flying or flying open mouth.

An other way to (re)use your turkey head is repeating the famous (1957) experiments of Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of the University of Pennsylvania.

Joel Slemrod and Wojciech Kopczuk have found evidence that people will do pretty much anything for money - even die for it. They tell us all about it in a study called Dying to Save Taxes.

Economists like to believe that people make rational decisions and base all their actions on cool self-interest. In the backs of their minds, though, they wonder….

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

The November issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Triumph of the Brians (1 and 2); Proof Less Strange Poet (triumph and nitpicker); Caffeine and the Learned Honey Bee; Crabs, Yawns, Stools, Frogs and a Jerk; Learning and Hooking; etc.

(If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It?s free.)

when you point out a problem with the evidence, people don’t engage with you about it, or read and reference your work. They get into a huff. They refuse to answer calls or email queries. They wave their hands and mutter sciencey words such as “quantum” and “nano”. They accuse you of being a paid plant from some big pharma conspiracy. They threaten to sue you. They shout, “What about thalidomide, science boy?”, they cry, they call you names, they hold lectures at their trade fairs about how you are a dangerous doctor, they contact and harass your employer, they try to dig up dirt from your personal life, or they actually threaten you with violence (this has all happened to me, and I’m compiling a great collection of stories for a nice documentary, so do keep it coming).

So writes Ben Goldacre in his November 16, 2007 essay “A Kind of Magic“, in The Guardian.

Investigator Betsy Devine writes with sad news:

It happened on Sunday, November 18, peacefully, without pain, after long illness.

To several generations of physicists, Sidney was guru, clown-prince, and zen-master. Sidney was the centerpiece of a thousand stories from the time that he was just a loud-mouthed brilliant fifteen year-old aka Squidney rampaging into Chicago?s sci-fi fan community.

Lubo? Motl collected a bunch of good Sidney Coleman stories on the occasion, in 2005, known as Sidneyfest. So did Jacques Distler.