Here is the Ig Informal Lecture by the winner of the 2020 Ig Nobel Entomology Prize. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. [In non-pandemic years, […]
Category: Research News
Research — on any and all subjects — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
The Consortium for Research About Profanity
“Welcome to the Consortium for Research About Profanity,” says the Consortium for Research About Profanity, then pausing ever so slightly before explaining: “The Consortium for Research About Profanity is a collection of researchers working on understanding how profanity functions in minds, between people, and across societies.” Who are they? They are a lively bunch:
A Rule of Thumb Arranged for Ten Fingers
A 1968 paper about mirror-making is a handy guide to a particular rule of thumb: The paper is: “A Rule of Thumb Arranged for Ten Fingers,” W.P. Barnes and Frank Cooke, Applied Optics, vol. 7, no. 3, 1968, pp. 454-454. The authors, at Itek Corporation, explain: To obtain a quick but useful estimate of the […]
Difficult to Recognize: Insights about Recognizing Masked Faces
Some people might find it difficult to recognize the insights in this new study about whether people find it more difficult to recognize faces that are obscured by masks: “The COVID-19 pandemic masks the way people perceive faces,” Erez Freud, Andreja Stajduhar, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Galia Avidan, and Tzvi Ganel, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]