Next time someone disrupts your evening by clambering in or out of a nearby theatre seat, remember: it needn’t be this way. In 1924, Louis J Duprey of Dorchester, Massachusetts, patented a system that “permits any patron of the theatre to enter or leave his place without at all disturbing other patrons”. You, the patron, entered vertically, […]
Category: Extra-Improbable columns
Our columns in other publications — The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine, beginning in September 2022, and the “Improbable Research”column that ran for 13 years in The Guardian newspaper.
The scariness of spiders to people scared of spiders
Here is one way to measure people’s fear of spiders. Post flyers seeking individuals who are very afraid of spiders, and who are willing to be paid a small amount of cash to participate in a research project, said project turning out to be the repeated answering of survey questions before and during the following activities: 1 approaching […]
The patent blossoming of artificial cauliflower ears for fight fans
In the spirit of making-lemons-into-lemonade, a few individuals have realised that, when life produces cauliflower ears, it might also be coaxed to produce customers who will pay money for replicas of cauliflower ears. A patent application (US 20130326793 [a detail from it is pictured here]) describes the fruit of their ingenuity: “An apparatus and method for wearing replica […]
What, When, or How Do Students Complain?
There may be no truly satisfactory way to measure how much or how well students complain. But several teams of researchers have tried. One attempted to measure how students complain; another, how they intend to complain. A third team tried to gauge students’ attitudes to complaining. These are not easy to measure well, or consistently. In 2010, David […]