Improbable Research

1st Global Conference Madness - Probing the boundaries

Monday 8th September - Wednesday 10th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary research conference seeks to explore issues of madness across historical periods and within cultural, political and social contexts. We are also interested in exploring the place of madness in persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical perspectives.

One featured topic is: “The Value of Madness or Why is it that We Need Madness?”

(Thanks to investigator Martin Kaluza for bringing this to our attention.)

The April 7, 2008 issue of the New York Times presents audio recordings of different species of fish making sounds.

Enough with the quibbling [in a past issue of AIR?] about whether our ancestors would have suffered higher mortality rates from having mechanical 24-hour clocks at their disposal or from having electronic 24-hour clocks. We will never know for certain, will we? My position on this argument was summed up, long before my birth, in the poem “Ballade of Primitive Man” by the Scotsman Andrew Lang, who died in 1912, some years after he wrote the poem. I enclose a photograph of Lang, which was made at some point during his lifetime. Lang wrote:

He worshipp’d the rain and the breeze, He worshipp’d the river that flows, And the Dawn, and the Moon, and the trees, And bogies, and serpents, and crows; He buried his dead with their toes Tucked-up, an original plan, Till their knees came right under their nose, ‘Twas the manner of Primitive Man.

Dr. Devindra Maas, Ancud, Chile

I entered my lecture hall at 10 a.m. sharp this morning, mentally girding my mental loins for a lecture on the null hypothesis. As I tripped merrily down the stairs, I noticed that my students were uncharacteristically silent. What, I thought, could render this garrulous crowd completely silent? Did all 100 of them have hangovers? Were they all reviewing their notes?

Then a young woman who sits in the front row screamed, scaring the crap out of me. She was yelling into her cell phone, and the rest of the class had, apparently, been enjoying one side of the soap opera that is her life.

“I’m tired of cleaning up after you!” (Pause.) “I’m tired of you taking advantage of me!” (Pause.) “Just get up and go to class!” (Pause.) “Why do I have to do all the work in this relationship?” (Pause.)

I reached the lectern with what must have been an incredulous expression on my face, because the class broke their silence and began laughing. This, apparently, was the moment they’d all been waiting for. The young lady didn’t seem to notice she was the center of attention (nor that she was being laughed at by 100 of her classmates)….

So writes the Angry Professor.

How sad to read that our education system appears to be allowing our embryonic scientists to miss the excitement of practical experimentation. Only yesterday I was talking to a man whose scientific epiphany came when a student teacher blew his hairpiece off in a thermite fume cupboard explosion. He said that the sight of the poor teacher reeling from the cupboard sooty of face and removing his goggles to reveal two shocked white eyes will stay with him to his
grave. The class naturally maintained a dignified silence. He went on to become a highly successful chemist, en passent blowing up a sink in his school chemistry lab.

So writes the pseudonymous “Charles Darwin” on his blog.