Improbable Research

Tickets for the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony go on sale today — July 31, 2009 — at noon (Boston time) from the Harvard Box Office. They are available online and at the Box Office in Holyoke Center in Harvard Square.

The ceremony will happen on Thursday night, October 1, at Sanders Theatre, honoring ten new winners whose achievements make people laugh then think.

This year’s theme: RISK. Benoit Mandelbrot will give the risky keynote address. The ceremony will include the premiere of The Big Bank Opera, a 4-act mini-opera in which Stylish bankers in a swanky Wall Street bar explain the explosive rise and fall of big banking and big bankers.

For further details, see the 2009 ceremony home page.

During the Fechtschulen, the public displays of skill where members of the local fighting guilds vied for prize money and “Kräntzlein“, injuries like noses split by swords, teeth knocked out by hits into the mouth, eyes gouged out by staff thrusts, even deaths were not uncommon… and how couldn’t they, considering the “scoring” mechanism was the “red sweat” pouring out of a head injury.

— so writes J. Christoph Amberger in “Behind the woodshed: Little-known aspects of Dussack play through the ages,” Journal of Western Martial Art, May 2003.

(Thanks to Bettina Kol for bringing this to our attention.)

Clarence Robbins [see photo at right] and Marjorie Gene Robbins visited theme parks hoping to find a good, representative mix of hairy-headed strangers.

They then wrote a study called Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America. It tells how Robbins and Robbins gathered data, combed through it, and extrapolated the strands to gain new understanding.

Clarence Robbins and Marjorie Gene Robbins were leading researchers at Clarence Robbins Technical Consulting, a thinktank located in their home in Clermont, Florida, near to four big theme parks – Epcot, Universal Studios, the Magic Kingdom and MGM Studios. In visiting those parks, the researchers set themselves a simple, clear goal: “to obtain data on the percentage of persons in the US with different lengths of scalp hair”.

The goal was not so easily attained….

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

The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Murphy’s Lawn; Murphy’s Bloat; Murphy’s Incompleteness Theorem; Ambiguous Educational Opportunity; Spent Mushroom Compost Odorous Component Poet; Goose Down Train Track; Melted Cheese, Erotic Vomiting; 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.)

While comparing the scores of random Joe Shmoes on a set of personality measures I had devised over the last few hours, I noticed strong positive correlations between some of them. I discarded the non-correlated ones and came up with the table shown here as Figure 2.

Experts tell me that the positive correlations of these measures must mean that there is some underlying general principle behind them, effected by some physical body. I call this underlying general principle General Ignorance (GI). The following set of numbers demonstrates how simple it is to assign numerical measurements that correspond to General Ignorance:

(That’s an except from the article “Where in your Head?,” Published in AIR 13:4.)

Investigator Tyler Hickle informs us that, in his professional opinion, this (the image the man is displaying) is not a genuine Rorschach ink blot.