MAY WE RECOMMEND--
The Pitfall and the Pendulum

Items that merit a trip to the library

by Bronchial Rorebacher, AIR staff

Here are two unrelated medical reports. We present them here, for reasons that escape us.

The Pitfall

"Demonstration of the Ascending Colon on Tc-99m MDP Skeletal Imaging: Pitfall in Bone Scanning by a Faith Cure of Drinking Urine," S. Kosuda, et at., Clinical Nuclear Medicine, vol. 25, no. 12, December 2000, pp. 1040-1. (Thanks to Miki Wilson for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at National Defense Medical College, Tokorozawa, Japan.

The Pendulum

"Human Balancing of an Inverted Pendulum: is Sway Size Controlled by Ankle Impedance?" I.D. Loram, S.M. Kelly, and Martin Lakie, Journal of Physiology, vol. 532, part 3, May 2001, pp. 879-91. (Thanks to Esther Topham for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK. The describe their simple experiment thusly:

Using the ankle musculature, subjects balanced a large inverted pendulum.

© Copyright 2001 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

This is a HotAIR exclusive feature item. For a list of other HotAIR featured items, see What's New.