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

August 2010, issue number 2010-08. ISSN 1076-500X.

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Monthly mini update/alert from the Annals of Improbable Research

This issue is at

<http://www.improbable.com/airchives/miniair/2010/mini2010-08.htm>

Archive at <http://improbable.com/airchives/miniair/>

Twitter: ImprobResearch / Facebook: <http://bit.ly/cd0I8P>

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

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2010-08-01 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2010-08-02 Imminent Events

2010-08-03 The Magazine: Mathematics Issue

2010-08-04 Remaining Ig Nobel Tickets Will Go on Thurs, Sept 9

2010-08-05 A Few Ceremony Details

2010-08-06 Survey Results: Lab Assistants Named Igor

2010-08-07 RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Discovering Interesting Holes

2010-08-08 Drug Snorting Fire-Eater Poet

2010-08-09 Medieval-Scenes-of-Ritual-Circumcision Competition

2010-08-10 Manga: Ig Nobel in Young Jump

2010-08-11 The Man in the White Suit

2010-08-12 MORE IMPROBABLE: Blame the Gull, Pizza Yea & Nay

2010-08-13 MAY WE RECOMMEND: Grackle "Anting" w/ Mothballs

2010-08-14 Improbable Research Events

2010-08-15 -- How to Subscribe to the Magazine (*)

2010-08-16 -- Our Address (*)

2010-08-17 -- Please Forward/Post This Issue! (*)

2010-08-18 -- How to Receive mini-AIR, etc. (*)

Items marked (*) are reprinted in every issue.

mini-AIR is

but a wee monthly *supplement*

to the bi-monthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research

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2010-08-02 Imminent Events

Coolidge Corner Cinema, Brookline, MA, MON, Sept 6

Remaining Ig Nobel tix go on sale THU, Sept 9

Brigham & Women's Hosp, Boston THU, Sep 23

Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony & webcast THU, Sept 30

Ig Informal Lectures SAT, Oct 2

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

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2010-08-03 The Magazine: Mathematics Issue

The special Mathematics issue of the magazine is online at

<http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume16/v16i4/v16i4.html>

Highlights include:

"It's Hard: To Be a Bat" by Alice Shirrell Kaswell"; Horse

Calculus" by Michael Berry" and "Chernoff and the Face Value of

Numbers" by Alice Shirrell Kaswell.

Read many back issues (including the recent Ig Nobel special

issue) online, and/or subscribe to the fully tangible paper

version, at: <http://www.improbable.com/magazine/>.

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2010-08-04 Remaining Ig Nobel Tickets Will Go on Thurs, Sept 9

A SMALL NUMBER of partial-view seats for the Twentieth 1st Annual

Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony are still available from the Harvard Box

Office, online, in person, and by phone.

THE REMAINING TICKETS — and there are not many — will go on sale

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2010, at NOON. They will be available from

the Harvard Box Office at the ticket office, in person and by

phone. They will NOT be available via the web.

The Harvard Box Office, Holyoke Center, Harvard Square.

(+1) 617-496-2222

<http://ofa.fas.harvard.edu/boxoffice/>

THE CEREMONY

The ceremony will happen at the usual place.

WHERE: Sanders Theatre, Harvard University

WHEN: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 7:30 pm.

This year's theme is BACTERIA.

Ceremony details: <http://improbable.com/ig/2010/>

DELEGATIONS

If you have five or more tickets and would like to register as an

official delegation, please do!

<http://improbable.com/ig/2010/#delegations>

* * *

WEBCAST PARTIES

The ceremony will be webcast live.

Details will be in next month's mini-AIR, and at

<http://improbable.com/ig/2010/#webcastinfo>.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation is hosting a public webcast-

watching party in Philadelphia. Natasha Rosenberg, the original

Miss Sweetie Poo (who is now a sophomore at UPenn) will be a

special guest.

If you would like to host your own webcast-watching party and

want the public to know about it, please get in touch with Global

Webcast Party Coordinator Neil Gussman at (+1) 717-314-2494,

<ngussman AT improbable.com>.

* * *

EVENT INFO LIST

We created a new, separate mailing list to notify people about

upcoming Ig Nobel and Improbable Research events. Please add

yourself to it:

<http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/ig-nobel-events>

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2010-08-05 A Few Ceremony Details

Almost all of the new winners are journeying to the ceremony, at

their own expense. A bevy of Nobel Laureates will hand them their

Ig Nobel Prizes.

The ceremony will also include...

The premiere of "THE BACTERIAL OPERA", about the bacteria who

live on a woman's front tooth, and about that woman.

A special brief microbial concert by EVELYN EVELYN (and their

friends AMANDA PALMER and JASON WEBLEY).

Amanda will be taking a night off from her two-month starring

role in the musical "Cabaret" at the American Repertory Theatre

<http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/cabaret>.

The 24/7 Lectures. This year's 24/7 lecturers:

NEIL GAIMAN

MARY ELLEN DAVEY

TOSHIYUKI NAKAGAKI

Past Ig Nobel Prize winners TOSHIYUKI NAKAGAKI and ATSUSHI TERO

(slime mold can solve puzzles); ELENA BODNAR (invention of a bra

that converts into 2 protective face masks); DON FEATHERSTONE

(creation of the plastic pink flamingo); KEES MOELIKER

(homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck); and CHRISTOPHER

CHABRIS (people can overlook anything - even a woman in a gorilla

suit)

... and much more.

DETAILS: <http://improbable.com/ig/2010>

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2010-08-06 Survey Results: Lab Assistants Named Igor

The results of last month's survey suggest that nowadays there

are few science lab assistants named Igor.

An alternate interpretation of the data has that that, however

many Igors there may be laboring in labs, no one wants to talk

about them.

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2010-08-07 RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Discovering Interesting Holes

This month's hand-selected research gem is:

"Discovering Interesting Holes in Data," Bing Liu, Liang-Ping Ku

and Wynne Hsu, Proceedings of Fifteenth International Joint

Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Nagoya, Japan, 1997, pp.

930-5. <http://bit.ly/cJvthZ> The authors, at the National

University of Singapore, explain:

"Clearly, not every hole is interesting.... However, in some

situations, empty regions do carry important information.... In

this paper, we propose an algorithm to discover holes in

databases."

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2010-08-08 Drug Snorting Fire-Eater Poet

The judges have chosen a winner in the Drug Snorting Fire-Eater

Limerick Competition, which asked for a limerick to honor the study

"Punk Rocker's Lung: Pulmonary Fibrosis in a Drug Snorting Fire-Eater".

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1507464/>

The winner is INVESTIGATOR Miriam Bloom who wrote:

A rocker who spewed fiery vapor

Found many a high-paying gaper.

But hot paraffin

Did not quite do him in.

He waxed better. They published a paper.

Here's the offering from LIMERICK LAUREATE MARTIN EIGER:

He played punk and his lungs filled with gunk,

Fibrous tissue and other such junk.

Snorted drugs he would do

And some chemicals, too,

Were the cause, so the doctors all thunk.

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2010-08-09 Medieval-Scenes-of-Ritual-Circumcision Competition

Medieval scenes of ritual circumcision inspire this month's limerick

competition. To enter, compose an original limerick that illuminates

the nature of this report:

"Medieval Scenes of Ritual Circumcision as a Reflection of

Sociopolitical Circumstances" [article in German], R.A, Pust, C Drost,

H. Willerding and T. Bschleipfer, Der Urologe, vol. 44, no. 3, March

2005, pp. 277-81. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00120-004-0761-9> The

authors, at Urologische Privatpraxis in München-Laim, report:

"Special attention was paid to the stained glass windows recently

returned to St. Mary's Church in Frankfurt/Oder, where circumcision of

the so-called Antichrist is also shown. Up to now we could not find any

medical historical information about this subject."

RULES: Please make sure that: (1) your rhymes actually do; and

(2) your poem is in classic, trills-off-the-tongue limerick form.

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

correct address) a free, uncircumcised, hi-res PDF issue of the Annals

of Improbable Research. Send your limerick to:

RITUAL-CIRCUMCISION LIMERICK COMPETITION

c/o <marca AT improbable.com>

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2010-08-10 Manga: Ig Nobel in Young Jump

The manga magazine Young Jump has a two-part series about the Ig

Nobel Prizes.

Part 1 has just been published in Young Jump volume 39, August

26, 2010. A few pages are reproduced on our blog:

<http://improbable.com/2010/08/27/young-jump-ig-nobel-manga-pt-1/>

Part 1 features, among other things, the incident in which Sir

Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the British government,

tried to ban the awarding of Ig Nobel Prizes to British

scientists.

Part 2 will appear in the succeeding issue of Young Jump.

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2010-08-11 The Man in the White Suit

Four of the Ig Nobel Ceremony organizers will perform (in in a

white suit, one in a blue suit, one in a silver suit, one in a

little black dress) at a special showing of "The Man in the White

Suit," maybe the greatest comedy ever made about a chemistry,

invention, and 1950's Britain, will happen at the Coolidge Corner

Cinema in Brookline, MA on Monday night, September 6.

<http://www.coolidge.org/node/2749>

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2010-08-12 MORE IMPROBABLE: Blame the Gull, Pizza Yea & Nay

Things you may or may not have missed:

Newest Members of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

(LFHCfS), etc:

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

BLOG <http://improbable.com/>

<> How not to get your article published

<> Boob research, pursued (en Español)

<> Don't blame the bear. Blame the gull.

<> Ives inside a cup of tea

And many more...

NEWSPAPER <http://improbable.com/category/newspaper-column>

<> Female college students, and rats

<> Pro-pizza and anti-pizza research findings

<> Horseflies, horses, and Horvath

twitter: ImprobResearch

facebook: "Improbable Research"

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2010-08-13 MAY WE RECOMMEND: Grackle "Anting" w/ Mothballs

BRONZED GRACKLE "ANTING" WITH MOTHBALLS

"Bronzed Grackle "Anting" with Mothballs," Raymond W. Hill, The

Wilson Bulletin, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Jun., 1946), p. 112.

<http://www.jstor.org/pss/4157489>

SWEATING, MEASURED DIFFERENTLY

"A Device to Improve the Schleger and Turner Method for Sweating

Rate Measurements," Alfredo Manuel Franco Pereira, Alexandre

Alves, Paulo Infante, Evaldo A., L. Titto, Flávio Baccari & J. A.

Afonso Almeida, Biometeorology, vol. 54, no. 1, January 2010,

pp.37-42. DOI: 10.1007/s00484-009-0250-3. (Thanks to Tom Gill

for bringing this to our attention.)

<http://www.springerlink.com/content/5776085513508l11/>

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2010-08-14 Improbable Research Events

For details and additional events, see

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

Coolidge Corner Cinema, Brookline, MA — Sep 6, 2010

Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston — Sep 23, 2010

Ig Nobel Prize ceremony — Sep 30, 2010

Ig Informal Lectures — Oct 2, 2010

Agronomy, Crops, and Soil Science Societies International Annual

Meetings, Long Beach, CA — Nov 3, 2010

NASW Annual Meeting, New Haven — Nov 5, 2010

Raytheon Employee Assn — Nov 10, 2010

AAAS, Washington, DC — Feb 2011

UK Tour — Mar 2011

Scandinavia Tour — Apr 2011

Cairo, Egypt — Jun 2011

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2010-08-15 -- How to Subscribe to the Magazine (*)

The Annals of Improbable Research is a 6-issues-per-year

magazine. (It's bigger and better than the little bits of

overflow material you've been reading in this newsletter).

To subscribe to the paper-and-ink version, go to

<http://improbable.com/subscribe/> or send in this form:

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Name:

Address:

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Zip or postal code:

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Phone: FAX: E-mail:

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SUBSCRIPTIONS (6 issues per year):

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Send payment (US bank check, or international money order, or

Visa, Mastercard or Discover info) to:

Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

PO Box 380853, Cambridge, MA 02238 USA

617-491-4437 FAX:617-661-0927 <air AT improbable.com>

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2010-08-16 -- 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: subscriptions AT improbable.com

Web Site: <http://www.improbable.com>

Blog: www.improbable.com

Twitter: ImprobResearch

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2010-08-17 -- 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

CO-CONSPIRATORS: Kees Moeliker, 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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2010-08-18 -- 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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To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit

<http://chem.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/mini-air>

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