Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
A new book echoes and explores some of the the perplexities that were honored, some years ago, with an Ig Nobel Literature Prize. The new book is called Index, A History of the. Dennis Duncan wrote it. (And here’s a review in the Globe and Mail.) The 2007 Ig Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to […]
The folks at Today I Found Out take a look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment: The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar […]
Mystery abounds, in little ways, in the industries that supply chemicals. Derek Lowe, writing in Chemical World, opens the curtain on some of those mysteries: So the world of chemical supply is far from straightforward, and it can be affected in unpredictable ways. The last two years have illustrated some of these… The complications become […]
Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]