Improbable Research

The eternal quest to figure out who’s a deviant and who’s not, and who things they are, continues. One research team adds to its impressive body of body work work:

“Body Art, Deviance, and American College Students,” Jerome R. Koch, Alden E. Roberts, Myrna L. Armstrong and Donna C. Owen, Social Science Journal, (article in print, 2010). (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, report:

“We use sub-cultural identity theory to propose that individuals with increasing evidence of body art procurement will also report higher levels of deviant behavior in order to maintain and/or increase social distance from the mainstream. We tested this proposition by surveying 1753 American college students, asking them to report their level of body art acquisition and their history of deviance.

Investigator Ura Daniels recommends this DigInfo News report:

At Eco-Products 2009, Oriental Co., Ltd. exhibited a revolutionary recycling machine called White Goat, which makes toilet paper from shredded paper. White Goat also has a shredding machine in it…. The dry paper is wound into finished toilet rolls, which emerge from the outlet one at a time.

Google Trends indicates that, in at least one way, comparative demand for toilet paper (blue below) has consistently outstripped demand for office paper (red below):

The vast archives of homeopathic literature do describe — once, in an 1864 book (see below for detail) — the danger of homeopathic medicine overdose.

We mention this as background to today’s worldwide demonstrations — volunteers take massive amounts of homeopathic medicines (medicines from which all the medicine has been removed) to demonstrate that those medicine-less medicines have no medical effect.

The British Antarctic Survey has put the entire Cephalopod Beak Guide for the Southern Ocean online, downloadable free (one entry, more mysterious than most, is reproduced below). The official description:

This is an up-to-date guide to identify the squid and octopods beaks, including 3-D computer images, making this book a extremely useful tool to marine ecologists dealing with trophic interactions in the Southern Ocean.

A 1983 medical report about Mexico [see details below] conceivably helps explain this January 28, 2010 AFP report (in the Windsor Star) from Argentina:

Eating pork is at least as effective as popping a Viagra pill to spice up your sex life, according to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who claims to have tested the theory. “Pork consumption improves sexual activity,” Kirchner informed a surprised gathering of business people at a meeting at the presidential palace.

Some historical perspective for the case of the New Orleans coroner whose election opponent is accusing him of selling body parts:

“Whose body is it anyway?: trading the dead poor, coroner’s disputes, and the business of anatomy at Oxford University, 1885-1929,” Elizabeth T. Hurren, Bull Hist Med, Winter 2008;82(4):775-818. The author, at Wellcome Trust Centre for Health, Medicine and Society at Oxford Brookes University, England. explains: