Sanford (“Spamford”) Wallace, the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winner in the field of communications (and also disco host), lost a court case yesterday, May 14, 2008. The Associated Press reports: MySpace wins $230 million anti-spam judgment By ANICK JESDANUN NEW YORK (AP) ? A notorious “Spam King” and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 […]
Month: May 2008
Library items: Fishing gear
It might be the best-kept secret in the state. And you can check it out at the public library; that is, the public libraries in Coventry, Lincoln and Scituate ?? just in time for fishing season. Tucked in among the stacks of books are cabinets stuffed with fishing equipment: rods, reels, tackle boxes, hooks, lures, […]
Karen McFarlane Holman joins LFHCfS
Karen McFarlane Holman has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Thomas McFarlane, who nominated her, says: My sister, Karen, has had luxuriant flowing hair ever since we were children. The photo shows it swinging around during a performance with her band, The Funhouse Strippers. She is also a chemistry professor using infrared spectroelectochemistry […]
Listening to the urinary stream
Tim Idzenga came up with the idea of using the sound produced by the urinary flow in the urethra as a measure of the urethral resistance. He performed the measurement by placing a microphone against the perineum, between the scrotum and anus. The frequency spectrum of the sound was found to correlate with the narrowing […]
To Describe Is to Forget
?The Misremembrance of Wines Past: Verbal and Perceptual Expertise Differentially Mediate Verbal Overshadowing of Taste Memory,? Joseph M. Melcher and Jonathan W. Schooler, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 35, no. 2, April 1996, pp. 231-45 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0013). The authors, who are at the University of Pittsburgh, report that: When participants generate a detailed, memory-based description […]
Anonymity, in Bulk
With some modern exceptions (see ?How to Write 85,000 Books,? elsewhere in this issue of the Annals of Improbable Research) every book has a human author.1 For whatever reasons, some of those books are published anonymously. The late nineteenth century saw a massive effort to identify and list all the anonymous books and other literature […]
Knows Better
Not having purchased a full subscription to New England Journal of Medicine I haven?t access to the article ?Amebiasis from the ?Miraculous Water of Tlacote? [which you mentioned]. Nonetheless I?ve taken tlacote tablets for three years and have suffered no ill effects. In fact I?ve found it most helpful. Millions of people have availed themselves […]
End upon end upon end…
Short book titles that start with “The End of …” began to appear long ago. George Waring’s The End of Time, published in 1790, set a good, clean standard for title pithiness. In 1795, Thomas Spence followed suit with The End of Oppression. The trend was set. Here are some, but by no means all, […]
Bozo, Down Under and re-organized
In reference to your Bozo item: A few years ago at the Australian National University in Canberra, the School of Biological Sciences was created, or reorganised (or something!). Several departments were brought together and then split up in a slightly different way. When it came to naming each new Division, there emerged 1) Botany & […]
Religious programming (Lancastrian)
Prof. Awais Rashid of the Computing Department at Lancaster University is looking for a Ph.D. student to help him in “rethinking the? classical notions of abstraction in software engineering.” He’s offering a position called “PhD Studentship – Divinity and Abstraction: A Theory of Software Engineering ?for Systems-of-Systems .” Closing date for applications: 15 May 2008. […]