I am very happy to report that I’m now writing the weekly Feedback column in New Scientist magazine. That began a few weeks ago, in September 2022. It’s in addition to the things ongoing here at Improbable Research.
I am especially thrilled to be able to do this. Here’s why. The Feedback column was created by John Hoyland. John and I became frequent collaborators (he and I alerting one another to items that might, and in most cases did, turn out to be useful to me in the Annals of Improbable Research or to John in Feedback). When John died a few years ago, I wrote a remembrance and tribute to him, which I hope you will read. When New Scientist invited me to, you might say, follow in John’s footsteps, it sparked great joy.
Here are links to the first six of these columns:
- On smoking, tea drinking and “mental activities after dinner”
- Lifting the curtain on a century-old theatre trapdoor seating system
- Do men and women prefer different nose-based gestures?
- Ig Nobel prizes 2022: The unlikely science that won this year’s awards
- World Standards Day approaches – but there is no standard date for it
- How to boil an egg so the yolk ends up on the outside of the inside
Each column is a hodgepodge of short items — about research that makes people laugh then think. I’m trying to write these in the spirit that John Hoyland pioneered, and also in a way that’s newly improbable.
As always, if you run across things that make you laugh then think — and which the world ought to know about — please send them here. I will sort out the most appropriate and inappropriate of those, and give them a good home in Feedback or here at Improbable Research (or, if they are appropriately multifarious, maybe even, in different ways, in both).
-Marc Abrahams