Research — on any and all subjects — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Jesse Han is becoming good at winning unusual awards. In 2017 he traveled to Harvard University, to receive the 2017 Ig Nobel Fluid Dynamics Prize, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. [His research on that was published in study called […]
Almost all scientific discoveries come — directly or indirectly — from things that people at first thought to be strange, weird, crazy, stupid, and/or just plain wrong. This essay looks at a few of the zillions of examples: “Oddball Science: Why Studies of Unusual Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial,” Patricia L.R. Brennan, Duncan J. Irschick, Norman […]
Sometimes a citation can sound like a metaphor: “Asymptotic study of the blowhard problem for the supersonic flow of a gas past sharp slender bodies,” A.M. Antonov, and Yu A. Belov, USSR Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, vol. 16, no. 6, 1976, pp. 227-232.
People who worship cats (or maybe less fervently, care unusually much about stuff related to cats) inspire other people to try to analyze why and how those people care so very much. J.C.E. Austin made one of the most notable recent attempts to make sense of it all. Details are in her PhD dissertation: ” […]