Improbable Research

An October 19, 2007 This Is London report provides the basics for a good examination for any forensic analysis class. The question reduces to: Is the damage consistent with the alleged activity? The report says:

Military helicopter crew ‘wrecked’ conservatory by flying down to ogle sunbathing au pair

A military helicopter destroyed the conservatory of a ?1.75 million mansion when its pilot swooped too low to look at a sunbathing au pair, a court heard yesterday.

The four servicemen flying the Merlin helicopter were said to have dropped to 500ft or lower for the “frolic” in July.

The house’s owners claim the downdraught from the aircraft seriously damaged the 23ft-high glass conservatory, leaving it needing to be replaced.

Barry and Anna George, who own The Old Stables in Eastbourne, East Sussex, are claiming ?250,000 in damages plus legal costs.

(Thanks to investigators Leslie and Frank Gage for bringing this to our attention.)

An historic meeting has just happened in Palmerston, New Zealand. Investigator Betsy Devine writes (and writes, also, about this phase of Internet-availability history):

Here you see Frank with New Zealand?s own James Watson?no, not the infamous James Watson biology Nobel but the deservedly honored (with a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize) author of a paper on Mr. Richard Buckley?s exploding trousers.

New Zealand is a lovely land full of surprises, whose only non-good surprise has been just how hard it is to get internet access even from hotels that advertise ?broadband internet.?

Item: Palmerston North Coachman Hotel, where we paid for ?broadband wifi? and then discovered that the signal didn?t reach as far as our room.

Item: Albany Executive Inn, just north of Auckland, which charges $4 for your first 20 Meg per day and $.15 more for every Meg on top of that level. Heck, 20 Meg hardly covers my uploads to Flickr!

Stan B. Walters claims, honestly or not, that he is The Lie Guy. As proof of a sort, he informs people that he has trademarked the phrase “The Lie Guy.” Mr. Walters owns U.S. trademark # 75382040.

Cassidy?s theories are insubstantial, his evidence inconclusive, his conclusions unlikely, his Gaelic atrocious and even factitious, and his scholarship little better than speculation. In short, his book is preposterous.

Cassidy paints himself as the maligned scholar, the unappreciated genius, the outsider. He may be all of those things, but he is them by choice: his work cannot withstand scholarly scrutiny so he simply cannot afford to join forces with any larger body of experts who do this sort of thing for a living. His book falls apart on first reading by anyone with some expertise in the field.

So writes lexicographer Grant Barrett about Daniel Cassidy?s book How the Irish Invented Slang.

UPDATE: Mr. Cassidy’s book may be inspirational. Since this blog item?the one you are reading now?appeared, a Cassidy admirer has been bombarding us with vitriolic email. Each email message included a copy of one or another newspaper columnist review of Mr. Cassidy’s book. These reviews range from the admiring to the bemusedly half-admiring to the workmanly space-filling.

Scott Sandford’s classic 1995 AIR article ‘Apples and Oranges: a comparison‘ has recently been translated into Dutch by chemistry teacher Machiel Stolk. The translation ‘Appels en peren: een vergelijking‘ comes together with questions for students on the subject of absorbtion-spectroscopy. Please note that the Dutch are used to compare apples with pears, contrary to oranges:

Monsters van de appel en de peer werden bereid door beide vruchten meerdere dagen op 60?C in een oven te laten drogen. De gedroogde vruchten werden in een mortier fijngemalen en gemengd met kaliumbromide. Van beide poeders werd honderd milligram genomen. Deze hoeveelheden werden geperst tot twee cirkelvormige pillen, met een diamter van 1 cm en een dikte van 1 mm. Infrarood transmissie spectra werden opgenomen, met een resolutie van 1 cm-1, met behulp van een Nicolet 740 FTIR spectrophotometer. Figuur 2 toont de infrarood transmissie spectra van een Granny Smith appel en een Conference peer.

We welcome translations of this AIR classic into other languages. It would follow in the tradition established by the Universal History Translation Project, which grew another classic published in AIR:

“The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less,” Eric Schulman, 1997, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 27.