THEORY: It sounds like a great idea to hire a psychopath as long as they’re ambitious and will leave for another job after a couple of years. SUGGESTIVE EVIDENCE: This June 14, 2007 report in the Tasmania Mercury (which we referred to two days ago): “Psychopaths are very comfortable in successful corporations because they are […]
Month: July 2007
The effects of Uriah Heep on fish
Do fish suffer from exposure to Uriah Heep? A Finnish researcher is to study fish in an aquarium while a rock group performs nearby, to see if the sound causes any ill-effects or distress. Bands including aging rockers Uriah Heep will perform on Friday night to about 3,000 fans in a tent just a couple […]
Colonoscopy in the news: Bush and bang
President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday, and will transfer power to Vice President Dick Cheney during the procedure, expected to take about two and a half hours, the chief White House spokesman said. So says a July 20, 2007 CNN report. Colonoscopy enthusiasts will recall our pocket history of colonoscopy booms, which begins: […]
Psychopaths in Oz
Dr Clarke, who has penned two books about workplace psychopaths and will speak at the state government-sponsored Queensland Safety Show in Brisbane next week, today said up to three percent of the Australian population was psychopathic. “I would say that in every major company there would be at least one,” Dr Clarke said. “Psychopaths are […]
Leaping lizards (feeble-footed variety)
The Bible tells of frogs that fall from the sky. Biologists, on the other hand, tell of lizards that fall from trees. The biologists – William Schlesinger, Johannes Knops and Thomas Nash – recount in great detail how they discovered an unsuspected truth about lizards. Their study Lizardfall in a California Oak Woodland, published in […]
Harry Potter scholarship
The heaps of Harry Potter scholarship ought not be overlooked as the world awaits the July 21, 2007 arrival of the seventh and final Harry Potter book. The September/October 2005 issue (vol. 11, no. 5) of the Annals of Improbable Research was the special Harry Potter and the Exploding Toads issue. Several of the scholarly […]
LSD as a treatment for autism
Is LSD a good treatment for autism? There were some experiments to find out. But… The major lesson to be learned from this little known set of studies is that all too often controversial treatments are touted as promising on weak evidence and flawed studies. It is extremely difficult to evaluate the evidence from methodologically […]
Dirty old math books hold clue to dirty elections
Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end. This meant that their colleagues who shared the library preferred quantities beginning with the number […]
Graph: The hardness of a faux pas
Miss Conduct devised this simple graph to analyze a faux pas:
Another hiccup victim goes untreated
Despite the existence of a simple treatment for intractable hiccups, yet another long-suffering victim is being celebrated in the press for going untreated. (A teenage girl in Florida got was similarly untreated and celebrated earlier this year.) The treatment, for which Dr. Francis Fesmire was awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize, is digital rectal […]