Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
“Ig Nobel Laureates Patricia Yang and Park Seung-min Deliver First Joint Public Talk in Korea on Excrement Research” says the headline of a July 23 report by DongA Science. The report goes on to explain: “Dong-A Science marks its 40th anniversary with a July 25 event at Seoul National University featuring Ig Nobel Prize–winning studies […]
Some people worry about pedagogical density. Some of them write about that worry, so that others can read about it. A new addition to all this is the study: “Introducing pedagogical mediation to make theory-dense linguistics research available for classroom intervention,” Eloy Romero Muñoz and Dilin Liu, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, vol. 5, no. […]
The special PEOPLE issue (volume 32, number 4, July/August 2026) of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research has gone go out to subscribers. Even if you are not a subscriber you can read several of its articles online free, for looks at many aspects of digestion and/or indigestion: People Research Review Unattractive and Attractive People […]
Chernoff faces are an unusually human way of representing statistical data. Herman Chernoff, who conceived of them, died on July 6, 2026. Read an appreciation of him from the Stanford University department of statistics (where he was for many years on the faculty). We have many times celebrated the wonder and power of Chernoff faces, […]