Ig Nobel Prize winner Jim Gundlach, co-author of the study “The Effects of Country Music on Suicide,” in Upper Oddington, England, during the 2008 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK. The tour is part of the UK’s National Science Week. Photo: Carol Gundlach. (That’s an excerpt from AIR 14:4. A glorious large version of the […]
Month: September 2008
Duck guy visits sex museum
On his way to the Ig Nobel prize ceremony, 2003 biology prize winner Kees Moeliker will stop over in New York for a public talk in the Museum of Sex. Tuesday, September 30th at 1 and 4 pm, he will take part in a gallery chat in the exhibition ‘The Sex Lives of Animals‘. MoS […]
Chakrabarty, Fish Photo Detective
The sturgeon the man is holding in the photograph sent in by Dr. Grossi (AIR Vents 13:6) is a juvenile of either Acipenser fulvescens, the lake sturgeon, or Acipenser oxyrhynchus, the Atlantic sturgeon. (I am leaning toward the latter.) I am fairly certain of this identification based on the color of the scutes relative to […]
Breakthrough: Beyond the paperless office
A court in Mumbai, India has achieved, indeed far surpassed, the decades-long dream of “going paperless” — of eliminating paper and paperwork, replacing it with electronic technology. According to a July 21st, 2008 report in the Times of India: MUMBAI: The state police can now bank on a forensic tool to achieve speedy convictions. For […]
Nomenclature Quiz: Lure or Band?
Fish lures often have evocative names. So do rock bands. Can you discern or detect which of the following names belongs to a fish lure and which to a rock band? (You may find hints by consulting the published philosophical literature on the question “What’s in a name?” And you may not.) The answers appear […]
September mini-AIR
The September issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: More Sex From A. Slob; Regge Pole Poet; Ultrasonic Velocity Measurements in Frozen Model Food Solutions; etc. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It’s free.)
Roasting Faith Popcorn
“Burned Popcorn and Broken Crystal Balls: Beware of False Prophets Bearing Food,” Ed Chung, Hiroshi Nakamura and Amy Spielbauer, in Proceedings: Marketing Management Association Spring Conference 1999. R. Green, D.Varble and G. Wunder, eds.. Chicago, 1999 . The authors, at St. Norbert College, Wisconsin, report: “In the late 1980’s, Faith Popcorn forecasted the trends of […]
Improbable Research TV episode 107.5
Here’s episode 107.5 (“Incompetence, claw, claw”) of the Improbable Research TV series. To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel). Improbable TV can also be seen on MySpace and elsewhere. These are three-minute videos about […]
The FBI’s EZ pocket guide to WMDs
For deathly economy of wording, nothing much beats a pamphlet published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (WMD); A Pocket Guide. On this single sheet of paper, America’s celebrated crime-fighting organisation tells you everything you might want to know, if you didn’t want to know much, about weapons of mass […]
Forensic Adventures: Birthday Boy
The accidental death at home, by hanging, whilst wearing a tutu, of the 13th Earl of Gurney, strikes some people as being both absurd and, if you’ll pardon the expression, a one-off. True, that particular death is fictional (it occurred near the beginning of the 1972 film The Ruling Class). True, absurdity can be difficult […]