Reto Schneider’s book of weird experiments is weirdly sublime. Schneider’s web site (www.weirdexperiments.com is the English-language version / http://www.verrueckte-experimente.de is the German-language version) gives generous excerpts. It also has some of the most gripping science video clips in existence. Among them are: – the first meeting of a robot dog and real dog – the […]
Category: Arts and Science
Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Good hair at Penn State
Gretchen Holtzer, Mary Parent, Priti Pharkya and Aron Parekh, the noted chemical engineers, have joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. The Magnificent Four are at Penn State University. The institution are (or soon will be) renowned for their abundance of luxuriantly-flowing-haired researchers.
Bureaucratic toadying
Investigator Robert Bendesky writes: An editorial in the Winter 2004 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reports that a toad provided more correct responses to Medicare policy questions than Medicare customer service representatives. A 2004 GAO study found that 96 percent of the time, customer reps gave the wrong answer to physicians asking how to […]
Calling all performing British tea/coffee-brewing scientists
If you are (A) a scientist who (B) follows a good ritual for preparing either tea or coffee and you (C) are in Britain or (D) will be in Britain during the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK during March, and (E) you would enjoy BRIEFLY demonstrating that ritual onstage at one of the shows […]