Improbable Research

Newspapers today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book A Hundred Years Hence:

the regeneration of the newspaper will be forced upon the newspaper-office by the development of public intelligence.…

a well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selection. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the printed opinions, real or momentarily assumed, of other people.

Next Monday, Sept 6, at 7:00 pm, at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, in Brookline, MA, Marc Abrahams (the man in the blue suit — an Ig Nobel Prize-winning self-perfuming business suit) will introduce a special showing of the classic Alec Guinness film “The Man in the White Suit“. Daniel Rosenberg (the man in the white lab coat) will add insights about the chemistry of the white suit. Special appearances by Human Spotlight Jim Bredt (the man in the silver suit) and Boston Globe Miss Conduct columnist (and Improbable Research psychology editor) Robin Abrahams (the woman in the little black dress).

War today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book A Hundred Years Hence:

we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of destruction : the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war.

Advertising today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book  A Hundred Years Hence:

advertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

This month’s Quasi-Poetical-Research-Paper-Title-of-the-Month is “On Quartzite Lenticles in the Schists of South-Eastern Anglesey” read by Edward Greenly (who also read the abstract of the paper) at a meeting of the British Association, in Liverpool on September, 1896.

BONUS: Edward Greenly also wrote The metalliferous mines of Parys Mountain.

The manga magazine Young Jump has written a two-part series about the history of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Here, below, are a few (non-sequential) pages from part 1, which was published on August 26. (The magazine’s cover is reproduced here, at right.)

Part 1 features the founding of the Igs and of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and a few highlights from ceremonies. We see one of the inventors of Bow-Lingual, the computer-based dog-language-to-human-language translation device, and his son, who accompanied him dressed in a dog suit. We also see the incident in which Sir Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the British government, tried to ban the awarding of Ig Nobel Prizes to British scientists. We see other things…