Savor, if you will, the lurch of latter-day suits. Compare and contrast these two descriptions of men who scrounged materials to build suits of armor to protect them against possibly malevolent forces. First, Troy Hurtubise, 1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner, who built a suit of armor to protect him against grizzly bears. Stephen Smith wrote […]
Year: 2013
Juan-Carlos Perez-Cortes joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club (LFHCfS)
Juan-Carlos Perez-Cortes has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He says: I’m a computer scientist working in the field of Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. I have been pursuing a billion-dolar project to design an algorithm that identifies a luxuriant flowing hair from a regular hair in an image taken at a distance of more than […]
A sort of cow, and some sorts of cockroaches
Here’s a year-end tiny collection comprising a cow and lots of cockroaches. The cow is mechanical, caught here on video (Thanks to Rachel Ehrenberg for bringing it to our attention): [vimeo]15577865[/vimeo] The University of California supplies this description: Cow: the digestive system’s complex mysteries: Nova Jiang is an artist and UCLA alumna who makes work […]
Dog excretion accretion as indicator of Earth’s magnetic field
This study gathered and assessed evidence of the possible effects of the Earth’s magnetic field on the tangible output of dogs: “Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field,” Vlastimil Hart [pictured here], Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Milo¿ Je¿ek, Tomá¿ Ku¿ta, Veronika N¿mcová, Jana Adámková, Kate¿ina Benediktová, […]
Foot size and balancing – a link?
Doctoral student Hai Qiu and professor Shuping Xiong of the Ergonomics and Applied Biomechanics Lab at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea, have recently been investigating ‘The Influence of Foot Sizes on Human Balance’ “This study investigated the relationship between foot size and human balance performance. The balance performances of 30 […]
New Internet search fails to turn up evidence of time travelers
Internet search engines are not yet reliable enough to find evidence of time travelers — if that information exists and if it’s findable. That’s what this new study suggests: “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers,” Robert J. Nemiroff [pictured above], Teresa Wilson [pictured below], arXiv:1312.7128, December 26, 2013. The authors, at Michigan Tech, write: “Time […]
Makeover for the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) site
Fashion news! We’re giving a makeover to the website for the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS) and its conjoined clubs, The Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists™ and The Luxuriant Facial Hair Club for Scientists™. LFHCfS began in 2001 with its first member (psychologist Steven Pinker), and became so popular that it quickly grew beyond the bounds of […]
Sam Lloyd’s Get-Off-the-Earth Puzzle
Jill Britton writes about one of the most influential of the influential puzzle-maker Sam Lloyd‘s puzzles: One of the most popular puzzles ever created was the Get Off the Earth puzzle, invented by American’s premier puzzlist, Sam Loyd, in 1898. Over ten million copies of the puzzle were produced…. The puzzle shows a number of […]
Thesis topics, each summarized in one sentence
Students describe their thesis topic, in one sentence. The LoL My Thesis web site presents lots of these single-sentence summaries. Here are a few [each with the person’s field-of-study and institution]: This is a weird star cluster and we absolutely have no idea how it formed – sorry. [Astrophysics, Whitman College] A kiwi egg, despite […]
Human exhaust-pipe found-object registry (2013, in one country)
Thank you to the disturbingly many people who alerted us to this article in Deadspin: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums This Year? As in past years, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has created a searchable database of emergency room visits around the country. And as in past years, we have trolled the data […]