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The mini-Annals of Improbable Research ("mini-AIR")

Issue number 2007-09

September 2007

ISSN 1076-500X

Key words: improbable research, science humor, Ig Nobel, AIR, the

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A free newsletter of tidbits too tiny to fit in

Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

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2007-09-01 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2007-09-02 Imminent Events

2007-09-03 What's New in the Magazine

2007-09-04 Tea Catechins in Chicken Meat Systems

2007-09-05 Ig Nobel Ceremony - Oct 4

2007-09-06 Ig Lectures - Oct 6

2007-09-07 Gerbes for the Starved

2007-09-08 Android Hermetic Melancholia Poet Void

2007-09-09 Hopping Variation in the Perched Chicken Competition

2007-09-10 Newest Noted Researchers

2007-09-11 RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Engineer's Perspective on Socks

2007-09-12 BLOGLIGHTS: Potato Head, Menstrual Joy Questionnaire

2007-09-13 MAY WE RECOMMEND: Unreality of the Chopsticks

2007-09-14 Improbable Research Events

2007-09-15 How to Subscribe to AIR (*)

2007-09-16 Our Address (*)

2007-09-17 Please Forward/Post This Issue! (*)

2007-09-18 How to Receive mini-AIR, etc. (*)

Items marked (*) are reprinted in every issue.

mini-AIR is

a free monthly *e-supplement* to the print magazine

Annals of Improbable Research

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2007-09-02 Imminent Events

IG NOBEL CEREMONY and LECTURES - Oct. 4 and 6. See

<http://www.improbable.com/ig/2007/2007-details.html>

GENOA SCIENCE FESTIVAL - Oct. 26. See

<http://www.festivalscienza.it/it/programma/evento.php?id=463>

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2007-09-03 What's New in the Magazine

The September/October issue (vol. 13, no. 5) of the Annals of

Improbable Research is the special Meaning of the Finger issue.

It will be arriving on subscribers' doorsteps soon. Highlights

include:

<> "Finger Celebrities" by Alice Shirrell Kaswell and Stephen

Drew. A survey of the work of comparative-finger-length

researchers John Thomas Manning, Emma Nelson; Martin Voracek;

Marc Breedlove; Peter Hurd, Mark Brosnan, Siegfried Dewitte, Bram

Van den Bergh, Siegfried Dewitte, and Bram Van den Bergh.

<> "Digital Incarceration: The Finger Pillory" by Stephen Drew.

The finger pillory is a simple device for restraining the finger—

and thus the body—of someone who has been fingered as being a

miscreant. This article examines the finger pillory pithily.

<> "Spectroscopic Discrimination of Shit from Shinola" by Thomas

H. Painter, Michael E. Schaepman, Wolf Schweizer and Jason

Brazile. We conducted an experiment to determine whether people

can tell shit from Shinola (a brand of shoe polish once

manufactured in the United States). We find that to the human

eye, the two substances are inseparable given similar morphology,

whereas with near-infrared spectroscopy one is easily

distinguished from the other.

The table of contents is online at <http://tinyurl.com/2msfwr>

To subscribe (6 paper issues per year) go to

<http://improbable.com/subscribe>

or see info at bottom of this newsletter.

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2007-09-04 Tea Catechins in Chicken Meat Systems

Investigator Jack Thomas Ultcht sent us a fifteen-page registered

letter about chicken. At least we think it's about chicken.

Most of the letter was typed in a language we were not able to

identify, despite appeals to a variety of linguists, and a good

long repair to the library. The only passage we were able to

comfortably make sense of (typographic errors, aside) says:

"Antioxidative Mechanisms of Tea Catechins

in Chicken Meat Systems"

A web search reveals this to be the title of a study done at

University College Cork-National University of Ireland. Authors

S.Z. Tang, J.P. Kerry I, D. Sheehan, and D.J. Buckley published

it in the journal Food Chemistry (vol. 76, no. 1, January 2002,

pp. 45-51.)

Make of this what you will.

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2007-09-05 Ig Nobel Ceremony - Oct 4

The 2007 IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY will happened on Thursday night,

October 4. The winners are traveling to Harvard from five

continents. Several past winners are returning to congratulate

them. The prizes will be physically presented by Nobel Laureates

Dudley Herschbach, Robert Laughlin, Sheldon Glashow, Roy Glauber,

William Lipscomb, Craig Mello, and perhaps one or two others.

The ceremony's theme this year is CHICKEN, which will be

reflected in the premiere of the mini-opera "Chicken versus Egg."

TICKETS available from the Harvard Box Office

<http://www.boxoffice.harvard.edu/>

The live webcast will be at www.improbable.com

Details at <http://www.improbable.com/ig/2007/2007-details.html>.

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2007-09-06 Ig Lectures - Oct 6

The Ig Informal Lectures will be at MIT on Saturday afternoon,

October 6, featuring the new winners and several past winners

(yes, including the Duck Guy). Admission is free, but seating

capacity is limited.

Details at <http://www.improbable.com/ig/2007/2007-details.html#informal-lectures>.

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2007-09-07 Gerbes for the Starved

Following our brief mention of gerbes

(http://tinyurl.com/249vb5), letters trickled in asking for more

about this reputedly delightful concept. Here, then, are the

titles of some fairly recent studies about gerbes:

More about gerbes.

Relative gerbes.

Deformations of gerbes on smooth manifolds.

A gerbe for the elliptic gamma function.

Gerbes and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

The Maslov gerbe.

Flat connections from flat gerbes.

Loop groupoids, gerbes, and twisted sectors on orbifolds.

Transgression of the index gerbe.

These gerbe oeuvres, and others, can be found at

<http://arxiv.org/>.

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2007-09-08 Android Hermetic Melancholia Poet Void

The judges have declared, sadly, that there is no winner for last

month's Android Hermetic Melancholia Competition, which asked for

a limerick to honor the study "Hermetic Melancholia and the

Suffering of Androids."

However, we do have this from Limerick Laureate MARTIN EIGER:

We build robots, and puppets as well.

They get mad. They feel pain. They raise hell.

We misjudge them. This, thus, is

What the author discusses.

But is he human? No one can tell.

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2007-09-09 Hopping Variation in the Perched Chicken Competition

Hopping Variation in the Perched Chicken is the subject of this

month's limerick competition. To enter, compose an original

limerick that illuminates the nature of this report:

"Ability of Laying Hens to Jump Between Perches:

Individual Variation and the Effects of Perch Separation

and Motivation on Behaviour," G.B. Scott; B.O. Hughes,

N.R. Lambe, and D. Waddington, British Poultry Science,

vol. 40, no. 2, April 1, 1999, pp. 177-84.

RULES: Please make sure your rhymes actually do, and that your

poem is in classic, trips-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive a (if we manage to send it

to the correct address) a free, possibly feather-clad issue of

the Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per

entrant) to:

HOPPING CHICKEN LIMERICK COMPETITION

c/o <marca AT chem2.harvard.edu>

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2007-09-10 Newest Noted Researchers

New members of The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

(LFHCfS):

Susanna M. Lewis, Ph.D., LfHCfS

Dan F. McCune, Ph.D., LFHCfS

LFHCfS member Joshua Brandon Holden retired, controversially.

See them and the other members at:

<http://improbable.com/category/lfhcfs-hair-club/>

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2007-09-11 RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Engineer's Perspective on Socks

Each month we select for your special attention a research report

that seems particularly worth a close read. This month's pick:

"Prevention from Slipping Down of Top Parts of Socks" [article in

Japanese] Toshiyukia Tsujisaka, Yoichi Matsumoto, Hiroaki

Ishizawa, Yoshiaki Azuma, and Hideo Morooka, Journal of Textile

Engineering, vol. 52, no. 1, 2006, pp.43-9. (Thanks to Patty

Verber for bringing this to our attention.)

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2007-09-12 BLOGLIGHTS: Potato Head, Menstrual Joy Questionnaire

Here are some recent topics in our blog:

<> An octopus and Mr. Potato Head

<> How to begin an obituary

<> The bang-free bomb and the bomb-free bang

<> "Landmark Study Investigates Arrogance"

<> Ig Nobel winner Van Impe: Origin of the auto

and some from the newspaper column in The Guardian:

<> The Menstrual Joy Questionnaire

<> Knees: Passive value

<> Arm-wrestling with automation

<> Where can you find love and laughter?

<> Heated debate about coffee

... and others

Read the blog

every day at <http://www.improbable.com>

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2007-09-13 MAY WE RECOMMEND: Unreality of the Chopsticks

DOWNHILL FROM DEATH

"Death: From Bad to Worse," F.M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality Volume

I: Death and Whom to Save From It, July 1998, pp. 11-13. (Thanks

to F.T. Prettyman for bringing this to our attention.)

SIX SINGHS ON THE HAPPY SEEDER

"The Happy Seeder Enables Direct Drilling of Wheat into Rice

Stubble," H. S. Sidhu, Manpreet-Singh, E. Humphreys, Yadvinder-

Singh, Balwinder-Singh, S.S. Dhillon, J. Blackwell, V. Bector,

Malkeet-Singh, and Sarbjeet-Singh, Australian Journal of

Experimental Agriculture, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 844–54. (Thanks to

Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)

CHOPSTICKS DUALITY

"Differences Between Actual and Imagined Usage of Chopsticks: an

FMRI Study," S. Imazu, T. Sugio, S. Tanaka, and T. Inui, Cortex,

vol. 43, no. 3, April 2007, pp. 301-7. The authors are at Kyoto

University.

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2007-09-14 Improbable Research Events

For details and additional events, see

<http://improbable.com/improbable-research-shows/complete-schedule>

IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY -- OCT 4, 2007

IG INFORMAL LECTURES -- OCT 6, 2007

FESTIVAL DELLA SCIENZA, GENOA, ITALY -- OCT 2007

IMPERIAL COLLEGE, LONDON -- NOV 26, 2007

AAAS ANNUAL MEETING, BOSTON -- FEB, 2008

IG NOBEL UK TOUR -- MAR, 2008

DFG ANNUAL ASSEMBLY, BERLIN, GERMANY -- JUL 1, 2008

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2007-09-15 How to Subscribe to AIR (*)

The Annals of Improbable Research is a paper magazine. (It's not

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2007-09-16 Our Address (*)

Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

PO Box 380853, Cambridge, MA 02238 USA

617-491-4437 FAX:617-661-0927

EDITORIAL: marca AT chem2.harvard.edu

SUBSCRIPTIONS: air AT improbable.com

WEB SITE: <http://www.improbable.com>

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2007-09-17 Please Forward/Post This Issue! (*)

Please distribute copies of mini-AIR (or excerpts!) wherever

appropriate. The only limitations are: A) Please indicate that

the material comes from mini-AIR. B) You may NOT distribute mini-

AIR for commercial purposes.

------------- mini-AIRheads -------------

EDITOR: Marc Abrahams

MINI-PROOFREADER AND PICKER OF NITS (before we introduce the last

few at the last moment): Wendy Mattson

COMMUTATIVE EDITOR: Stanley Eigen

ASSOCIATIVE EDITOR: Mark Dionne

PSYCHOLOGY EDITOR: Robin Abrahams

CO-CONSPIRATORS: Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Gary Dryfoos, Ernest

Ersatz, S. Drew

MAITRE DE COMPUTATION: Jerry Lotto

AUTHORITY FIGURES: Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschbach, Sheldon

Glashow, William Lipscomb, Richard Roberts

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2007-09-18 How to Receive mini-AIR, etc. (*)

What you are reading right now is mini-AIR. Mini-AIR is a (free!)

tiny monthly *supplement* to the bi-monthly print magazine.

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