Wikipedia reports a not-all-that-widely-known fact about Donald Knuth (Knuth wrote what many consider to be the bible of computer programming; he is also, in many ways, the father of much of what is now commonplace in the technology of displaying fonts on computer screens): In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie […]
Category: Improbable Investigators
People who do research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Ig book publication day (and Troy)
Today is the official publication day for our new book The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World’s Unlikeliest Research (ISBN 0525949127). Please spread the word! This book tells the stories, in glorious and inglorious detail, of a completely different heap of Ig Nobel Prize winners than appear in the book The […]
Smiley face :-) birthday on Sept 19
Investigator Robert Bendesky writes On 19 September, 1982, the smiley face emoticon was born at the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon. The person who proposed it is Scott Fahlman. His story of its birth can be read here. The Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed can be found here.
The Duck Guy’s radio gig
Kees Moeliker, aka "The Duck Guy," now has a weekly live column on national radio about his biological adventures and encounters. Moeliker is a man of many parts. Here are three of them:1. Curator of birds at the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam.2. Winner of the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case […]