Every June 5, for 11 years now, a small number of staff members of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam silently celebrated what they call “Dead Duck Day”, to commemorate the sudden and dramatic death on June 5th, 1995 of the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) that entered the scientific literature as the first victim of homosexual necrophilia […]
Month: May 2008
Why Parisians behave as they do
Scientifically speaking, exactly what makes April in Paris delightful? A computer scientist of my acquaintance, a Paris native now living abroad, analysed the question and wrote up a study that will be published soon, albeit pseudonymously. His data imply that vacations and strikes are what drive Parisians to behave as they so famously do. Paris […]
Cutesy: Tintin and the ShrinkShrink
?Acquired Growth Hormone Deficiency and Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism in a Subject With Repeated Head Trauma, or Tintin Goes to the Neurologist,? Antoine Cyr, Louis-Olivier Cyr, Claude Cyr, Canadian Medical Association Journal, vol. 171, no. 12, December 7, 2004, pp. 1433-4. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.1041405). (Thanks to Doug Hatlelid for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain that: We […]
Relief Therapy!
When illness or injury strikes, you want to feel relief. Our new Relief Therapy? ensures that you will. When you visit our clinic we will therapeutically decrease your comfort level, using state-of-the-science technology: loud ambient sound; flicker-fluorescent lighting; and chilled air. Three hours of that, and then you go home. You will feel almost instant […]
Dylan Tweed joins LFHCfS
Dylan Tweed has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says: I started my PhD in 2005, in the field of large scale structure formation. I’m currently working on the semi-analytical galaxy formation model GalICS with the horizon-project french consortium. I don’t know why girls put flowers on my head in spring. Dylan […]
Blah blah from chicken chicken
Nigel Tomm’s 2008 novel, The Blah Story, composed almost entirely of the word “blah,” is a delightfully cheap knock-off or follow-on to Doug Zongker’s delightfully cheap research study “Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken,” which was published in the September/October issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. We would be pleased to learn about earlier, equally […]
Not Even Wrong: Chapter 2501
Physicists enjoy it when someone pontificates jerry-built nonsense ? nonsense based on assumptions that are known to be wrong. Physicists see this as an invitation to use their most famous dismissive phrase: “It’s not even wrong.” Authority figure Michael Medved, in a column about deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) published May 14, 2008, demonstrates the concept of […]
Editors love intestines
Newspaper editors, some of them, are eternally fascinated by intestines, and sometimes let this creep into their work. Today’s example, from the Boston Globe, is the headline in a report about a baseball player named Bartolo Colon, who might replace an injured player on the local team. The headline: “Colon may fill the void Tuesday“.
Handing it to the bird, in the bush
People say a ?bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?, but try masturbating a two metre tall, 120 kilogram male ostrich with powerful legs and toenails and you?ve got a challenge on your hands. Dr Irek Malecki, co-supervisor of the project, said the technique, which involved using a dummy female for collecting […]
Lead versus feathers, Round 2
A pound of lead feels heavier than a pound of feathers – a thing long suspected, but not carefully tested until recently, when Jeffrey B Wagman, Corinne Zimmerman and Christopher Sorric ran an experiment involving lead, feathers, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, a chair, blackened goggles, and 23 volunteers from the city of Normal, Illinois. The […]