This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Boxing: thinking outside — From time to time, the sport of boxing changes its rules. But for the most part, it still requires that each participant in a match be both human and alive. (Exceptions do occasionally pop up – kangaroos are the heavyweight exemplars.) Joseph Lee at Flinders University in Australia has explored a way to expand boxing’s rigid traditions. He outlines his thinking in a study in the journal Ethics and Philosophy called “Thinking outside the ring of concussive punches: Reimagining boxing“….
- Classified walls — … Feedback learns, thanks to reader Dave Brooks, that there is a taxonomy of stone walls, outlined in “Taxonomy and nomenclature for the stone domain in New England“. Are there good taxonomies of stone walls in other places?
- Economics of surfing — What is the value of surfing, if you express it as money? …
- Car jeers and cheers — … Roots went on to found Lysander Spooner University in Montana, an institution that, though little known (it is unclear whether the university has any students), modestly boasts that it is “dedicated to truth and free inquiry, and to educating the politically and socially estranged. We are low cost and high quality. The world’s first truly antigovernment university.” Of all the world’s universities, it may be the most fervently driven to theory.
- Dead ant repellant — Visits to a cemetery may occasion a lively conversation for entomologists and exterminators who read a recent study by Thomas Wagner and Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The study in question is called “Corpse-associated odours elicit avoidance in invasive ants“.