It’s shameful when valuable data goes unused, especially when that data was produced at great public expense. In October of the year 2000, we presented an Ig Nobel Prize to the authors of a study called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“. Almost exactly a […]
Month: March 2008
?After all, aren?t we all a hypoteneuse??
David Weinberger reviews a popular Copanhagic play about physicists: We saw Michael Frayn?s Tony-award-winning play, ?Copenhagen,? last night. Disappointing. It?s about the mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Newark, NJ. (Nope. In Copenhagen. Just kidding. Haha.) The play goes over various ?drafts? of the meeting, trying out possible explanations of why Heisenberg, […]
He died from a love of poetry
Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that’s not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It’s a simple fact. Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His […]
The truth behind the Bozo Van
E. Edward Bozoyan received US patent #2929336, issued in March 1960, for a “valve structure.” Alas for Mr. Bozoyan, search engines now identify him as “Bozo Van”. As for Bozo (not Mr. Bozoyan), his history appears to be a muddle. To dip into the saga, begin with a report called “The Unusual History of Bozo […]
Dog-Assisted Surveillance
U.S. patent #6782847 granted August 31, 2004 to David Shemesh and Dan Forman, both based in Israel, for an ?automated surveillance monitor of non-humans in real time.? The patent contains a sequence of three drawings?reproduced here?that, by themselves, pretty much explain the inventors? thinking. In this technical drawing, two of the sensor-bearing dogs are alarmed […]
A The Problem with My Books
Might Yi-Chuan not have understood that I meant her to alphabetize my books, not library books? I scanned the shelves. They made no sense. I cleaned my glasses. ?These books are totally unordered!? I finally exclaimed to Hui-wen. She figured it out and offered, ?No, they are ordered — by title!? While I know fifty […]
Glimpses of the Ig UK tour
Two kaleidoscopic looks at last week’s Ig Nobel Tour of the UK appear in the March 18, 2008 issue of The Guardian. Kees Moeliker’s tour diary (excerpted) begins: With scientific accuracy Dan Meyer warms up the audience: “First I have to deal with my gag reflex, then flip my epiglottis, put my pharynx and gullet […]
Calculator for the incalculatable
Investigator William J. Maloney writes: I came across this calculator to help the math challenged: http://dutyrefund.com/pdc-1.htm You type in a number, then type in a percentage. Then the calculator calculates that percentage of the number. It’s quite a time-saver. They call it a “drawback calculator.”
Cutesy: The Princess Anne Toilet Paper
?Do Women with Urinary Incontinence Really Know Where All the Toilets Are?: The Toilet Paper,? Annette Kuhn, Kathleen Vits, Peter Kuhn and Ash Monga, European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, vol. 129, no. 1, November 2006, pp. 65?8 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejogrb.2005.11.004). (Thanks to Domenico Pecorari for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, […]
Third-Order Optical Nonlinearity in Guinness Stout
“Third-Order Optical Nonlinearity in Guinness Stout,” F.Z. Henari and W. Blau, Photonic Science News, vol. 3, 1998, pp. 10?3. (Thanks to Mauricio Alvarez-Manilla for bringing this to our attention.) (That?s an excerpt from the article “May We Recommend ? Items that merit a trip to the library,” published in AIR 14:1.)