Investigator Verena Wieloch writes about the photosynthesis-related phenomenon called "feedback de-excitation quenching": "Isn’t ‘feedback de-excitation quenching’ when someone rains on your parade?"
Month: July 2005
Cricketing surnames: the big 270
Govindarajan Venkatesh, who sometimes goes by the name Venkatesh Govindarajan, is the author of "Cricketing Surnames, Very Proper Common Nouns," wherein he reveals that: Of all the men (alive and deceased) who have represented their respective countries in the international arena right from when the first ball was bowled in the very first Test Match […]
Double-grooved trainees: standards
Two inventors at Microsoft have been granted a patent (US #6,913,466) for a method of "training a trainee to analyze media, such as music." Some observers find it intriguing that "The process includes an initial tutorial and a double grooving process." But double grooving is a standard engineering procedure, for which there are established double […]
Research: taking sides
Which side is which? Which dominates the other? These are questions faced regularly by readers and writers of the journal Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain, and Cognition. 2002 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Chris McManus of University College London is one of the journal’s editors. (Thanks to 2000 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Richard Wassersug […]
Mysterious floating ideas
Almost nothing is more romantic than a mathematical theorem – if that theorem is stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift during a perilous sea voyage in wartime, and if the person who wrote it is one of the world’s top mathematicians. Shizuo Kakutani, who died last August, threw many such bottles into the ocean […]
Ig poster 2005
For what it’s worth, there is now a quasi-nifty poster (in downloadable PDF format) for this year’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.
Inventors beware
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office lists complaints they have received about would-be invention promoters.
Legends of forgetting (animal)
"Legends of forgetting" is a short film by M. Jourdan Atkinson of Texas Southern University, who says it is "a documentary about displaced histories, fantasies, and artifacts emanating from a farm site in the Southwestern Missouri." A still photo from the video shows a carving of an animal which, says Atkinson, has never been properly […]
Recursion at a glance
Thanks to Mike Stanfill of the Infinite Cats Project, you can see quickly and simply — movingly — the basic idea of recursion. [NOTE: The Infinit Cats project was featured in the special Cats Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.]
The prehistory of rap
Professor Steven Mithen of Reading University also thinks the cave- dwellers would have enjoyed the rhythms and sounds made by rap artists. So says a June 30, 2005 BBC News report about Professor Mithen and his new book, The Singing Neanderthal : The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. (Thanks to Remo Tamayo for […]