Ryan P. Smith, writing in Smithsonian magazine, tells of the book that tells of “The Bizarre Tale of the Tunnels, Trysts and Taxa of a Smithsonian Entomologist“: A new book details the sensational exploits of Harrison G. Dyar, Jr., a scientist who had two wives and liked to dig tunnels Dyar instigated fiery feuds with […]
Month: May 2016
Pedestrian Potential-Collision Standoffs, and Symmetry Breaking
We’ve all experienced this phenomenon: you and someone else are walking towards each other in opposite directions, and you don’t want to collide. Do you shift to the left or to the right? And how should you shift to avoid a standoff? In a new paper on the arXiv, physicists Nickolas Morton and Shaun Hendy […]
Dead Duck Day, June 5th, honoring homosexual necrophilia in the mallard
Sunday, June 5th, 2016 is the 21st edition of Dead Duck Day, arriving precisely one year after last year’s Dead Duck Day. At exactly 17:55 h [Rotterdam time] we will honor the mallard duck that became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer the 2003 Ig Nobel […]
Car Horn Honking Studies (part 1)
Anyone who has driven a vehicle in various different countries might have observed that the national rate of ‘horn honking’ varies considerably – but why? A widely-cited study by Douglas T. Kenrick and Steven W. MacFarlane (published in 1986) investigated whether one simple variable – temperature – might be having an effect. The team organised […]