About once per decade, the medical profession takes a careful look back at Thailand‘s plethora of penile amputations. The first great reckoning appeared in a 1983 issue of the American Journal of Surgery. Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam, by Kasian Bhanganada and four fellow physicians at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, introduces […]
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.
Experiments show we quickly adjust to seeing everything upside-down
In the middle of the 20th century, an Austrian professor turned a man’s eyesight exactly upside-down. After a short time, the man took this completely in his stride. Professor Theodor Erismann, of the University of Innsbruck, devised the experiment, performing it upon his assistant and student, Ivo Kohler. Kohler later wrote about it. The two of […]
When an economist talks rubbish
When economists talk economics, some of them talk rubbish. Few mean it as plainly, as directly, as Alexi Savov [pictured here]. Savov wrote a study called Asset Pricing with Garbage, which filled 24 pages of the Journal of Finance early in 2011. To Savov, garbage is valuable not only for its own worth, but because, in […]
Medico-Legal Disagreement About Nipples
Personal peer review – peering at data with one’s own eyes – is deemed crucial to some kinds of investigation. This eyeballed scrutiny figures in the war against indecent images of children. A study called Tanner Stage 4 Breast Development in Adults: Forensic Implications looks at the very different things different experts saw when they all peered at […]