Improbable Research

I have often told that the tale of my necro-duck has inspired many. ‘Tell me who?’ people often ask me. Well, here is one for a start: the gifted British stand-up comedian Stewart Lee with one of his 2007 shows ‘The March of the Mallards’.

So begins a translation of my latest blog entry (written in Dutch) at www.moeliker.com. Here, for your convenience and amusement, a google translation of that post.

Daniel Eastwood, MS, Consulting Manager, Division of Biostatistics, Medical College of Wisconsin responded rapidly to ‘The Rodriguez File’:

“Please see the attached image, where I have drawn in all similar occurrences of spaces between words that appear to have some linear relationship (at least until I got bored). Here the instance of a ‘line of five’ doesn?t seem all that uncommon, given that there are at three other instances of lines 5 or longer within the same paragraph (the count may depend on how generous one is in counting a line as straight).

I would propose that if we count the length of all lines as a variable X, and use length 2 as the obvious minimum, that the distribution of lines length 2 or longer will follow approximately a Poisson distribution. That is where X is the length of lines, for Y = X ? 2, Y ~ Poisson (lambda). In this example, lambda might be a little more than one. I will let someone else count the lines through [...]“.

The image below shows a portion of the Boston Globe’s Boston.com web site on June 21, 2008. It is, or may be, a puzzle designed to delight and madden semioticians, business researchers, and other scholars.

As you can see, on the left is a news photo with this caption:

In this Wednesday, June 18, 2008 hand out photo, nurses are seen, posing near a monument to enemas at Mashuk Akva-Term Sanatorium in the town of Zheleznovodsk, Russian Caucasus Mountains region. Alexander Kharchenko, director of the Russian spa says the world’s first monument to enema treatments has been unveiled at the spa in the southern city of Zheleznovodsk. The bronze syringe bulb, weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels. (AP Photo/Mashuk Akva-Term Sanatorium, HO)

On the right is a man in a business suit above the large phrase “How can your business benefit.”

Scholars of a certain mind will scratch their heads and scribble their pencils over this. We, like them, would love to know the answer.

(Thanks to investigator Ron Josephson for bringing this to our attention.)

Today’s news delivers a great lesson for anyone who doubts that Americans are very, very religious. Here’s how religious Americans are: Only 73 percent of the athiests don’t believe in god.

“Massive study finds most Americans devout” says the headline in the June 23, 2008 Boston Globe report. Other media reports echo that.

The study, performed by the Pew Foundation on Religion and Public Life, is online. The statistics mentioned above are from the section called “Belief in God or Universal Spirit By Religious Tradition.” The pertinent part is reproduced here:

Social scientists and journalists are always careful, to some degree, in gathering and interpreting statistics. We trust that all the statistics in this report are as believable as the one mentioned here.

UPDATE, several hours later: What should you believe when something unexpected turns up in a survey? Believe that the people being surveyed are stupid. So implies Gregory Smith, a Pew Foundation researcher quoted in the Washington Post:

Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.

Smith said some people may identify with the term atheist or agnostic without fully understanding the definition, or they have a negative view of organized religion, even though they believe in God.

Yet again (click here to see a celebrated previous instance), doctors confronted with a medical problem ? one for which a cure is known ? seem not to have bothered reading the medical literature. The cure was described in the study “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,” by Francis M. Fesmire (Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872); it led to Dr. Fesmire’s receipt of the 2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize.

The new case was reported on June 19, 2008 by television station WISCTV:

Girl Fights 65-Day Bout Of Hiccups

OMAHA, Neb. — A chronic case of the hiccups has an Iowa woman looking for a cure for her daughter.

Dawn Swanger called Omaha television station KETV because her daughter, Ericka, 11, started hiccupping in April as she sat in her Missouri Valley classroom and hadn’t stopped.

“It started April 1,” said Ericka, speaking through hiccups. “We were in English class at school, and it was no big deal. Then, a couple weeks later, we started getting worried. They hurt, but not that much any more. I got used to the pain.”

The family has tried all kinds of home remedies, including a contraption called a “Hic-Cup.”

(Thanks to investigator Chris S. for bringing this to our attention.)