One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five …) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not read books.

This started with an observation last November - lots of people on the tube were starting books. Lots of them, reading the first few pages of books. None of them reading the end. Surely just coincidence?

Think again.

I started collecting statistics. I observed all the people on the trains that I saw reading books, and wrote down how far someone was through a book. I could not tell whether they were on page 276 out of 327, but I could estimate what proportion of the book they had read - 30%, 70% etc. Only real books count - manuals and computer books don’t, as people do not read them linearly. Magazines etc. don’t count, mainly because it is impossible to tell whether someone is on page 7 out of 13, or page 9. But a meaty bit of Tom Clancy or Dostoevsky or molecular biology or something, I got quite good at estimating how far on the readers had got. Of course, I had to note all the books being read in a carriage, to get a valid sample. This
lead to much craning and staring, and in any other country in the world I would probably have been shot. In England, of course, no-one comments.

Anyway, here are some numbers,…

So writes William Bains, in a Trinkaus-like study called “Why commuters do not read.”

Scientists who struggle to get their reports published, or to get anyone to pay attention to them, might consider the path blazed by Dr Mohamed El Naschie. El Naschie found an appreciative science journal editor. The editor subsequently published hundreds of El Naschie’s studies, and also made El Naschie a glamorous figure - featuring him in lavish photo-spreads in the company of famous scientists and powerful world leaders.

The science journal is called Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. Its founding editor-in-chief is Dr Mohamed El Naschie.

A 19-page pictorial in the August 2005 issue shows El Naschie in the company of numerous Nobel laureates, and also of many medals, plaques, certificates and floral arrangements.

There are four photos of him with Nobel laureate Gerardus ‘t Hooft, including one labelled: “El Naschie and ‘t Hooft received by Crown Prince Sultan in his palace in 2003″. We see him with Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, and in two photos with Naguib Mahfouz. One of the latter is captioned “N Mahfouz, Nobel laureate in literature, the first Arabic-speaking novelist to receive this honour, together with Mohamed El Naschie in Cairo. Mohamed was asked by Mahfouz to explain to him his theory, which he valiantly tried.” …

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

When I was a teenager, I made a commitment to read every book in the Searsport, Maine library. that’s not as daunting as you might think, given the small size of the library. I started in at ‘A’ and proceeded to nearly the middle of ‘A’. I read some awful crap and realized that just because someone invested a lot of time and energy in writing a book, didn’t mean that it was worth any of my time reading it.

So writes Earle Rich of Granite Geek

Man made appointment, then robbed tanning salon, police say

Man Sues Club After Being Hit in the Nose by Stripper’s Shoe

Man arrested for 190th time in Florida

Man gets shaggy eyebrows shaved for charity

Man’s alcohol-fueled attack on his door leads to arrest for pot possession

(Thanks to investigator Stefanie Friedhoff for bringing this to our
attention.)

Tim Berners-Lee
Invented HTTP
Thus the World Wide Web was born
For Nigerian Diplomats and porn.

The 2009 winning clerihew will be announced on July 10.

In the game of Quantum Soccer, the aim is to shape the wave function of a quantum-mechanical “ball” so that the probability of it being inside one of the goals rises above a set threshold. This is achieved by using the motion of the players to alter the energy spectrum of the wave function: when a player moves across the field, the energy that this action provides (or absorbs) enables transitions between certain modes of the wave function. The pairs of modes involved depend on the player’s velocity; the exact rules are spelt out in the mathematical details, but it’s easy to experiment using trial and error.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. To have it emailed to you every month, just fill in the wee form.)

As far as I can tell, the Big Ugly Community Center is neither big nor ugly. The history, they say is that “In 1993, the Big Ugly Elementary School was shut down and left empty. The community gained access to the vandalized building, they hauled water, scrubbed out the mold and mildew, turning the school into the current Big Ugly Community Center (BUCC).”

I knew I had to join the club when I saw that Dr. Pinker, a prof during my freshman year, is a central member.

Anna M. Barrett, MD, LFHCfS
Behavioral Neurology/Cognitive Rehabilitation
Assoc. Professor of Physical Medicine
& Rehabilitation, and Neurology & Neurosciences,
UMDNJ–NJMS
Director, Stroke Rehabilitation Research
Kessler Foundation Research Center
West Orange, New Jersey, USA

Alan Dundes liked to study uncomfortable jokes and the people who tell them. His 1979 study called The Dead Baby Joke Cycle, published in the journal Western Folklore, explains:

“Dead baby jokes are not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. They are told mostly by American adolescents of both sexes in joke-telling sessions with the intent to shock or disgust listeners. ‘Oh how gross!’ is a common (and evidently desired) response to a dead baby joke. Teenage informants of the 1960s and 1970s indicate that dead baby jokes were often used in a ‘gross out’ in which each participant tries to outdo previous joke-tellers in recounting unsavoury or crude folkloristic items.”

To Dundes, when a large group of people persistently make uncomfortable jokes about something, it’s something they are uncomfortable about. Thus, he writes, dead baby jokes are popular in the US because of “the traditional failure of Americans to discuss disease and death openly … many Americans prefer not to say that an individual is dead or has died.”

Dundes, a longtime professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, is himself dead, having died in 2005.

He appreciatively blamed England for introducing “sick humour” to the US, arguing that…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

“The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies,” Aleecia M. McDonald [pictured here] and Lorrie Faith Cranor, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 2008 Privacy Year in Review issue. The authors, at Carnegie Mellon University, report:

“Companies collect personally identifiable information that website visitors are not always comfortable sharing. One proposed remedy is to use economics rather than legislation to address privacy risks by creating a market place for privacy where website visitors would choose to accept or reject offers for small payments in exchange for loss of privacy. The notion of micropayments for privacy has not been realized in practice, perhaps because advertisers might be willing to pay a penny per name and IP address, yet few people would sell their contact information for only a penny.1 In this paper we contend that the time to read privacy policies is, in and of itself, a form of payment. Instead of receiving payments to reveal information, website visitors must pay with their time to research policies in order to retain their privacy. We pose the question: if website users were to read the privacy policy for each site they visit just once a year, what would their time be worth?”

(Thanks to investigator Erik Pasternak for bringing this to our attention.)

At the 1998 Ig Nobel ceremony, Chopra received personal expressions of wonder from Sheldon Glashow, a 1979 Nobel prize winner in physics and from Roy Glauber, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2005.

At an historic meeting in 2006, Chopra met up with fellow Ig Nobel Prize winner Jasmuheen. Jasmuheen received the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in literature for her book “Living on Light,” which explains that although some people do eat food, they don’t ever really need to.

I’m a 21-year-old female scientist, I have just finished my BSc in Computer Science at The University of York, UK. I am currently enjoying the summer holidays before continuing with a MSc at UCL in London (Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc). My main academic interests involve anything related to brains. I have had various forms of luxuriant (I hope) hair, ranging in colour from red to purple to blonde to blue-black to brown and back to red, at varying lengths. PS: Is there an official Facebook group for the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists? If not, there should be!

Olivia Guest, LFHCfS
Graduate student, Cognitive and Decision Sciences
University College London
London, UK