After 13 happy years as a columnist at The Guardian newspaper, I’ve stopped. It was a joy and a privilege working with the editors there. (You can read all those old columns — more than 500 of them — on the Guardian web site, and find links and bits of extra information here on the Improbable […]
Category: Newspaper column
Our newspaper column — about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — that ran in The Guardian for 13 years.
The Tradition of Shoe-Throwing at Weddings
Shoe-throwing may now be mostly a political act. But not long ago, it was a common rite of marriage, writes James Crombie of Aberdeen, who has gathered some matrimonial footwear-hurling facts into a 24-page treatise called Shoe-Throwing at Weddings. This was in 1895, when readers may have empathised with Crombie’s opening thought: “Pelting a bride […]
The Great Attempt to Catalog All Fetishes (including the pacemaker fetish)
On 28 October 2004 we humans took a giant step towards cataloguing all of our sexual fetishes. An Italian/Swedish research team, led by Claudia Scorolli [pictured here] at the University of Bologna, downloaded data from hundreds of online fetish discussion groups and spent the next three years analysing their haul. Then they published a study in the […]
Be still my beating heart … smashed fingers, battered shins and fake murder
If you (yup, you) use a fake weapon to brutally beat a stranger, and then slit his throat, and then shoot him in the face, and then you assault a little baby, will your heart and blood pump like mad — even if you know that it’s all a trick and the man will suffer […]
People-calculating: open doors and closed doors
Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum [pictured here] of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception […]
Why do so many people so often say “so”?
So … in this era when so many people use the word “so” to begin so many of their sentences, one scholar has written three studies analysing what happens when people begin their sentences with the word. Galina Bolden’s first “so” study, in 2006, explains that sometimes people use the word as a way of […]
Beach study suggests tourists like good weather
Do not assume that tourists prefer good weather when they visit a beach. A study published in the International Journal of Biometeorology in 2013 challenges that easy-to-make assumption. The researchers gathered evidence – rather than relying on mere guesses and assumptions – as to what kind of weather brings beachgoers to the beach. Here is […]
Pippa Middleton’s backside – the Freudian and Marxist interpretations
The scholarly community, a portion of it anyway, is diving ever-deeper in the analysis of the rear end of the sister of the wife of the man whose father’s mother sits on the throne of the United Kingdom. The interest has spread westward, to the Republic of Ireland. Ireland has no monarch, and thus does […]
Toppling of the Pops: A sometimes fatal quest for soda pop
We all know that fizzy drinks can affect the health of people who drink them, especially in super-size quantities, but – even worse – fizzy drinks in a vending machine sometimes bring immediate violent death when the machines are attacked. This is documented dramatically by Dr Michael Q Cosio in a 1988 research study published in […]
Bird-feather counters exhibited pluck, tediously
Many humans have spent days, months or years counting feathers. Here are exciting highlights from some of their reports. In 1936 Alexander Wetmore, of the US National Museum in Washington, gathered all the published reports he could find about someone or other counting how many feathers were on particular birds. “The work of feather counting […]