Improbable Research

Levi-Montalcini built a small research lab in her bedroom (and, when the bombing of Turin became too intense, in the attic of the country cottage to which her family fled), where she conducted experiments on chick embryos. That, my friends, is scientific grace under extreme pressure.

So writes Jennifer Ouellette about Rita Levi-Montalcini, who discovered nerve growth factor, for which years later she shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Troy Hurtubise is valiantly trying to auction another of his anti-grizzly suits of armor. This time, he is offering up the most famous of the bunch.

Back in early 2007, Troy? ? the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner in Safety Engineering ? attempted to auction off his “Trojan” combat suit. Unfortunately, the $35,000 minimum price was not met. This is not the first time Troy has had trouble finding eBay purchasers for his grizzly-resistant suits.

Troy is again attempting to recoup some of the money he’s put into his various projects (flame paste, the “Angel Light”, and of course, his various grizzly suits), this time by auctioning off the Ursus Mk VI suit featured in the documentary “Project Grizzly”. The suit is currently priced at a bit over US$2,000, and Troy hopes the ending price will exceed $40,000 by the auction’s end on July 14th.

Investigator Rose Fox writes:

Here you will find many of the yeasty books written by Dr. William G. Crook. (Occasional co-authors include Elizabeth B. Crook and Cynthia Crook.)

Dr. Crook’s research on yeast hypersensitivity has been prominently covered on Quackwatch. So apparently he was a quack as well as a Crook.

The new issue of BMJ [June 28, 2008] has a letter from a doctor who introduces (though he does not name) a new form of the grand British tradition of otting.

The best known of otting traditions is trainspotting. British citizens, some of them, also practice planespotting, busspotting [a practice which now draws disapproval from the British Government], and other varieties of otting. These may all be descended from the ancient practice of bird spotting, also known as bird watching.

The new variation is windowspotting. Here is the beginning of the doctor’s letter:

Climate change
Why so many open windows?

The BMJ is to be congratulated on repeatedly returning to the topic of measures to combat climate change, and encouraging doctors to take an interest in the issues. Preventing unnecessary fuel usage is important not only in combating global warming but it also leads to financial gains.

On 28 February I paid a visit to a local general hospital (500 beds plus) to count the number of open windows in all areas?there were 358. The building is some 30 years old. Most of the original windows were replaced with double glazed ones some years ago.I have difficulty working out how effective the double glazing is when the windows are open.

On Good Friday (21 March) I visited a friend in a surgical block at another hospital ? on one face of the block I counted 40 open windows. At yet another hospital on Easter Monday, a particularly chilly day, there were . . .

Barrie Smith, retired physician
Birmingham

A reader responded to Daniel Eastwood’s efforts (click here to see the exertions) to solve ‘The Rodriguez File’:

“Mrs Rodriguez may have meant ’straight vertical lines of 5 or 6 spaces’. You have drawn lines that have different angles. Would that make a difference?”

Naturally, Dan Eastwood, again dug into the file and replied:

“Yes it does. I interpreted her question to mean the diagonal line ending at about the extra ‘e’ before lucubrations. Rereading this now, I think I misunderstood her intent. Vertical lines are much easier to count though:
(Length, # of): 2, 23; 3, 2; 4, 0; 5, 1; 6, 1. This is an average length of 0.33, but a Poisson distribution (my original hypothesis) is most certainly not correct. Unfortunately, this makes the math harder.This isn?t a complete answer, but it?s the best I can do now:

There are 36 cases where a space on one line is followed by a space on the subsequent line (this counts longer lines several times) out of 15 subsequent rows. This is an average of 36/15 = 2.4 per pair of (subsequent) rows. In an 80 character line, the probability that a space will be followed in the next row by another space is 2.4/80 = 0.03.

Assuming the characters are random and the rows independent, then the probability a line of length 2 being followed by a third subsequent space is (0.03)^2 = 0.0009, a fourth is (0.003)^4 = 0.000027, and so on.

So the probability of getting straight lines of spaces 5 or 6 rows long is pretty small. Even without the math, I would guess that my assumptions of randomness and independence are probably not true. [...] Short of creating a bootstrap simulation of a random distribution of words in the paragraph and the ‘lines’ that result, I don?t see any way to get at this problem. The distribution of words isn?t really random, so maybe it?s not too surprising that those lines appear.”