Improbable Research

The psychology of particular crowds — especially the repeated emergence of irrepressible repressed patterns — is on display in Gary Carstensen’s sped-up video:

This is one week of activity of my game called “steal” where anonymous users are free to arrange the balls. Sometimes the users coordinate to make shapes, symbols, and words. Every second in the video was 30 minutes in real life. This was approximately May 2 through May 9. You can play the game here: http://stealgame.com/

(Thanks to Randall Munroe for bringing this to our attention.)

Eric Topol, lead author in the (approximately) 976-co-author team that won the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, gets cozy (and gets to be gotten cozy) with Sheryl Crowe and other rock stars in the June 2009 issue of the gentlemen’s magazine GQ. A May 28 report in The Scientist explains:

Researcher Razzle Dazzle

Biomedical researchers don’t typically rub elbows with rock-’n-roll royalty in the pages of glossy magazines. In fact, they never do. Until now.

In the June issue of GQ, a popular men’s fashion magazine, 11 of America’s leading biomedical researchers appear alongside celebrated pop musicians for a multi-page spread called “Rock Stars of Science.” … “We need to get the best and brightest excited to go into science and medicine,” David Agus, a University of Southern California cancer researcher, who was photographed alongside Scripps cardiologist Eric Topol and multi-platinum-selling singer Seal, told The Scientist. “This is an innovative way to bring attention to research.

Society can assume a more pro-health and preventive approach to family life.

So say Doris K. Williams and Bettye M. Caldwell on page 157 of Handbook for Involving Parents in Education, published by Humanics Publishing Group, 1985, ISBN 0893340847.

Pet food taste-testing by humans rose to a new level of formality this year, with the publication of two scholarly studies.

A paper called Optimising the Sensory Characteristics and Acceptance of Canned Cat Food: Use of a Human Taste Panel appeared in February. Its author, Professor GJ Pickering, of Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario, Canada, reports: “Cats are sensitive to flavour differences in diet, very discriminative in food selection, and clearly unable to verbalise their likes and dislikes. These issues have dogged the industry for decades.” Pickering explains that taste tests with volunteer cats suffer three drawbacks. They are “expensive to maintain, time-consuming, and yield limited and often equivocal data”.

He offers an alternative: “In-house tasting trials by a human taster are commonly conducted in the industry, although there is a paucity of relevant information in the scientific literature.”

His study serves up a hearty helping of information…

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

The May issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Accounting Research Extravaganza; He Shot a Bullet in the Air…; He Was Shot by an Arrow in the Air; They Saw an Arrow in the Mucous Membrane; Banana Fish vs. Horseface Loach; Dead Duck Day; Three Laus on the Flu; Bored Piles Poet; Apple-Braining Competition; Belgian Dopes; Feline Intent; Hit the Nail & Be Sarcastic; etc.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. To have it emailed to you every month, just fill in the wee form.)

Twin dangers — (1) the danger of biting sarcasm, followed by (2) the danger of sarcastic biting — are evident in a police incident reported in the May 27, 2009 Hartford Courant:

Banter among co-workers at the Connecticut Police Academy went too far when an adjunct instructor took another’s remark to “bite me” too literally, according to an arrest warrant.

Francis Woodruff, who is also a training coordinator at the Meriden Police Department, bit a license and applications analyst in the arm, leaving teeth marks and bruising, the warrant says.

Woodruff was arraigned Tuesday at Superior Court in Meriden on charges of disorderly conduct and second-degree reckless endangerment. He was released on a promise to appear.

Woodruff, 51, told state police that he was “horsing around” and only pretended to bite Rochelle Wyler, with whom he constantly jokes. Both are employed by the Police Officer Standards and Training Council.

(Thanks to investigator Jan Richards for bringing this to our attention.)