?Stylizing Rigor; or, Why Mathematicians Write So Well,? Alex Csiszar, Configurations, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 239?68. (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v011/11.2csiszar.html). The author explains that: Before bothering about whether a mathematician is telling the truth, an audience needs to judge whether it is a truth worth listening to, and indeed, what worth is in the telling at […]
Month: April 2008
Good is bad
Is it always wise to disclose good news? We find that the worst sender with good news has the most incentive to disclose it, so reporting good news can paradoxically make the sender look bad. If the good news is attainable by sufficiently mediocre types, or if the sender is already expected to be of […]
April mini-AIR
The April issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Kluge’s Masterpiece; Great Research Kluges, Journals for Your Life Cycle; Why Bedouin Robes Are Not Gray, Perhaps; Peat-Bog Man’s Intestines Competition; Music Response in a Mental Asylum; etc. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe […]
Problems reading your prescription?
Doctors have to suffer jokes about their supposedly horrendous, illegible handwriting. But several studies bolster their reputation for scratchy scribbling.There is illegible handwriting in Australia. We know this from a 1976 study in the Medical Journal of Australia, which tells how the handwriting of “a large number of” doctors and non-doctors was tested and compared. […]
How to Write an Interdisciplinary Research Paper
Saving for retirement can be an arduous task. The galactic fountain model predicts that energetic stellar winds and supernovae in OB associations produce superbubbles containing hot gas that breaks out of the galactic disk, cools radiatively as it rises upward, and recombines and returns to the disk ballistically. Time travel has occurred when the separation […]
Educator Johnson: Improbable is unreliable, bias [sic]
Educator Naomi Johnson concludes that the Improbable.com website ? and in particular a statistics article called “Who Will Win the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election?”, written by Eric Schulman and Daniel Debowy ? is “unreliable, bias[sic] and has no authenticity.” Johnson says “We do not know who the authors are.” Eric Schulman, unknown author, is surprised […]
Fairy tale science: Some educated guessing
Chris Gorski of the American Institute of Physics gathered scientists insights about certain fairy tales. Gorski writes: In the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, a witch holds a beautiful young woman captive in a tower. Rapunzel is blessed with a lovely singing voice and long, long blond hair. One day, her voice enchants a prince […]
MATH LESSON: Big numbers seen small
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a […]
Antibiotics, Antibiotics!
Antibiotics can be the key to your future health. Medicine fully came of age only with the invention and use of antibiotic drugs. Our new ExtraAntibiotics? program is based on the ancient principle that one can never get enough of a good thing. In place of your normal food intake, you will substitute liquid and […]
Fire-Eating: A Medical Hazard
?Fire-Eating: Hazards of Hydrocarbon Aspiration,? M. Guandalini and K. Steinke, Australasian Radiology, vol. 51, no. 6, December 1, 2007, pp. 567?9 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-1673.2007.01892.x). (Thanks to Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at Royal Brisbane and Women?s Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. (That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research Review,” published in AIR […]