Luckily, Vilumas Malinauskus, winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for creating the amusement park popularly known as “Stalin World,” in Lithuania was not murdered today. That fate met Vasily Bukhtiyenko, who set up the Stalin museum in 2005 in Volgograd, previously called Stalingrad. According to a Reuters report he was electrocuted and bludgeoned […]
Month: April 2010
Musical Madeleines
“In this paper, we consider musical cell-phone ringtones as virtual, communicative and cultural performances.” The paper is entitled ‘The Musical Madeleine: Communication, Performance, and Identity in Musical Ringtones’ and is published in Popular Music and Society, Volume 33, Issue 1 February 2010. The authors, at the Department of New Media and Digital Culture Studies of […]
Spittle on darts
Dr. Michael Spittle, Senior Lecturer in Motor Learning in the School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at Deakins University in Geelong, Australia, has a new study involving darts: “Amount of mental practice and performance of a simple motor task,” Kremer P, Spittle M, McNeil D, Shinners C., Perceptual and Motor Skills. 2009 Oct;109(2):347-56. The authors […]
Test of a Hairy Theory
“Beards, Baldness, and Sweat Secretion,” Michel Cabanac and H. Brinnel, European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, vol. 58, nos. 1–2, 1988, pp. 39–46. The authors, who are at Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, explain that [AIR 16:1]: “In 100 clean-shaven men direct measurement of the area of glabrous [in plain language: bald] skin on […]