We received a note from Elhassan Errezzaki of Anezi, Morocco. It says: Could you please send me some copies of skeptic magazines or some similar skeptic magazines and books especially by James Randi , Carl Sagan , Michael Shermer , Jared Diamond and Paul Kurtz . Used copies are also appreciated .It’s hard to find […]
Month: January 2009
Love hate notice (polls)
Investigator Rose Fox writes: I saw this bit of scientific inquiry on http://www.metrolyrics.com/ and had to take a screencap: I find it impressive that 27.4% of respondents—32,417 people—either don’t notice polls or hate them AND both noticed and answered this poll.
Sexy, dark headline (research)
This week’s headline of the day is from BBC News: Sex smell lures ‘vampire’ to doom (Thanks to investigator Rose Fox for bringing it to our attention.)
The bagel danger hunters
The degree of legal peril in eating a poppy seed bagel, long rumoured and feared by the public, became clear only when two doctors conducted an experiment. Elizabeth J Narcessian and HoJung Yoon, both at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, published their finding in a 1997 study called False-Positive Urine Drug […]
Improbable Research Collection #115
Here’s the new episode — #115, “Toad toe tapping” — of the Improbable Research TV series. As the title implies but only half reveals, it concerns the curious case of the cane toad toe tappers. To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, […]
Probably not the mathematician
Investigator Susan S. Young writes: “I’m sure you saw the news report in the January 27, 2009 Austrian Times about Alexander Kirilov. “I am almost certain that it is NOT the Alexander Kirillov who is my mathematical hero—he who wrote the beautiful, beautiful study “Coxeter Elements and Root Bases” (arXiv:0811.2324), which is my favorite mathematical […]
Woodpecker brains and the Super Bowl
“Dead athletes’ brains show damage from concussions” says a January 26, 2009 CNN news headline just days before the Super Bowl. It refers to the announcement that American football players’ heads are being battered to the point of great danger. Though seldom discussed, a solution may be found in the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winning […]
Bends on the Learning Curve
Medical transcriptions sometimes deal with family affairs. Here are some examples: She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce. Her mother looked at her ears today and brings them in today to be checked. (That’s an except from the article “Bends on the Learning Curve,” by […]
Linguistics lesson: English pronunciation
Linguists quarrel, sometimes fiercely, about how to pronounce certain words. This 1937 film clip shows one such argument about how to pronounce, among other things, the word “tomato”:
Homeopathic wine
The USB Wine Key, fictional though it may be, seems to be based on the Ig Nobel Prize-winning work of Jacques Benveniste. Benveniste is the only person who has been awarded two Ig Nobel Prizes, his second, in 1998, was “for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information […]