mini-Annals of Improbable Research (“mini-AIR”)
January 2022, issue number 2022-01. ISSN 1076-500X.
<https://www.improbable.com/airchives/miniair/>———-
Research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
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01 TABLE OF CONTENTS
02 IN THE MAGAZINE ITSELF: The Special ICE CREAM Issue
03 Pardon Our Temporary Glitches: Moving the Guts
04 Men’s Search for Meaning: Legos
05 See the first (Improbable) Conversation: Cats & Wugs
06 Limerick Challenge: Men’s Search for Meaning — Idleness
07 Pandemic Squished the Spring Ig Nobel EuroTour This Year
08 Few Circular Winner
09 Dramatic Improbable Readings, for U to C
10 MORE IMPROBABLE: Moon, Robbery, Stressed Cats
11 Men’s Search for Meaning: Legos Revisited
20 SOME IMPROBABLE EVENTS
30 — Subscribe to the Actual Magazine! (*)
31 — How to start or stop receiving this little newsletter (*)
32 — Contact Info (*)
33 — Standard Gobbledegook (*)
Items marked (*) are reprinted in every issue.
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02 IN THE MAGAZINE ITSELF: The Special ICE CREAM Issue
What you are reading at the moment (mini-AIR)
is overflow detritus from
the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).
The special ICE CREAM issue (vol. 28, no. 1) of the magazine has gone out to subscribers. See the table of contents and selected articles at <https://improbable.com/publications/magazine/air-vol-28-issue-1/>
Contents (some of which anyone can read online, free) include:
Ice Cream Research
Ice Cream Headaches
Ice Cream Impacts
Ice Cream Stick Research
Medicinal Instances of Ice Cream
Ice Cream Multiplicity and Frequency
Ice Cream and Happiness
May We Recommend: Unidirectional Friendship
Medical: Drinking Grandma, Snoring, Meditation
Improbable Research: Distance, High Heels, Blinking
Icky Cutesy Research: Lettuce Lego, Dog
Ig® and Beyond: Earwigs, Dog Food, and Ice Cream
AIR Vents: Turkey and Metal Bands Confusion
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Brain Science on Planet Eart
Ig Nobel Limericks: Reattachment and Dizziness
SUBSCRIBE to the MAGAZINE,
or get BACK ISSUES (there are more than 150 of them!):
<https://gumroad.com/improbable>
Tables of Contents: <http://www.improbable.com/magazine/>
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03 Pardon Our Temporary Glitches: Moving the Guts
We have moved all the Improbable.com web site files to a new host. Pardon, please, any glitches. We are work, work, working to find and rehabilitate those.
In the process, we are also doing some re-design, which we hope you will enjoy.
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04 Men’s Search for Meaning: Legos
This month’s somewhat randomly selected research report is:
“Men’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos,” Dan Ariely, E. Kamenica, and D. Prelec, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 67, 2008, pp. 671–677. (Note: Lead author Dan Ariely and several colleagues won an Ig Nobel Prize for unrelated research — specifically, demonstrating that expensive fake medicine works better than cheap fake medicine.)
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2008.01.004>
“If the effect of perceived meaning enters the disutility of labor additively, productivity (speed of building a Bionicle [a toy made of Legos]) should have the same effect on labor supply in the two conditions…. [Since] high productivity implies a lower time cost, we might expect to find a stronger correlation between labor supply and the speed of assembling Legos in the Sisyphus condition than in the Meaningful condition: the alienated workers in the Sisyphus condition might be more likely to make a cold calculation between their wage and their time cost, making more units if it takes them less time to build each one.”
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05 See the first (Improbable) Conversation: Cats & Wugs
Join us for the premiere of a new kind of conversation: Two researchers, in different fields, explore each other’s worlds a little bit. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, will compere. Here’s who and what:
“(Improbable) Conversation: Physics and Psychology of Cats”, with physicist (and Ig Nobel Prize winner, for exploring the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”) Marc-Antoine Fardin, and psycholinguist (and inventor of the Wug Test) Jean Berko Gleason.
This is the first in a collaborative series by The Conversation and Improbable Research.
It happens online, Thursday, January 20, 2022, at 4 pm (US eastern time).
It’s free.
Reserve a place in advance: <https://tinyurl.com/mryxmrvh>
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06 Limerick Challenge: Men’s Search for Meaning — Idleness
This month’s RESEARCH LIMERICK challenge — Devise a pleasing limerick that encapsulates this study:
“Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,” Christopher K. Hsee, Adelle X. Yang and Liangyan Wang, Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 7, June 2010, pp. 926–930. (Thanks to Jeremy Cook for bringing this to our attention.)
<https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797610374738>
Submit your perfectly formed, delightfully enlightening limerick to:
MEANING/IDLENESS LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o
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07 Pandemic Squished the Spring Ig Nobel EuroTour This Year
For the third consecutive year, the Covid-19 pandemic has, as one of its very least consequential side effects, squished the Ig Nobel Euro (and Brexitannia) Tour.
In 2020, the tour was scheduled to include events in the UK, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Yikes, though. That tour terminated immediately after its very first event (at the University of Manchester), as the pandemic suddenly descended on Europe.
In 2021, the tour did not happen at all.
This year, 2022, we were all going to give it a try, with institutions in several countries eager to host new events.
But… the pandemic roller-coaster keeps injecting too many unpredictable changes into the situation. Many people are reluctant to commit, in advance, to traveling outside their own countries. There are the risks not only of infection and illness, and also the less dangerous (but also real) risks of getting entangled in suddenly-changing travel and quarantine requirements. This is especially a problem for the Ig Nobel tour — having several Ig Nobel Prize winners plan to travel to events that, for each of them, involve international travel.
So… maybe next year!
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08 Few Circular Winner
The judges have chosen a winner in last month’s Competition, which asked for a limerick to explain this study:
“Our Irresistible Fascination with All Things Circular,” Stephen Few, Perceptual Edge Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, 2010, pp. 1-9
<https://perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/our_fascination_with_all_things_circular.pdf>
Winning limerickicist DIANNE O’LEARY writes:
So Few and his colleagues spurn pie.
Pie Charts, that is, and here’s why:
They waste too much space,
Which is quite a disgrace,
And confound folks, which none can deny.
This month’s take from our LIMERICK LAUREATE, MARTIN EIGER:
Most people like circles. I do.
So too, it is likely, do you.
In whom can be found
Disdain for things round?
This paper makes clear. Just a Few.
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09 Dramatic Improbable Readings, for U to C
Dramatic Improbable Readings is a *kind* of public event we invented: dramatic readings from published research studies that make people laugh, then think.
If you’ve never seen how it plays out, here’s your chance.
Every year, we organize a Dramatic Improbable Readings session at Arisia (the scifi con in Boston). But the Covid-19 pandemic led Arisia to cancel the 2022 convention.
Undaunted, we did and video recorded a new Dramatic Improbable Readings session, in honor of Arisia. The dramatic readers are: Mason Porter, Sonya Taafe, Dean Grodzins, and Gary Dryfoos. Michele Liguori is the timekeeper. David Kessler is the deobfuscator:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-opbOTCr_E>
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10 MORE IMPROBABLE: Moon, Robbery, Stressed Cats
Recent improbable research bits you may have missed…
BLOG: <http://www.improbable.com/>:
* Inspired by Ig Nobel Winner, China Builds a Rising Moon
* Topography of Robbery: Does Slope Matter? [study]
* Inconclusive Evaluation of Music Therapy for Cat Stress
*…and much more
LUXURIANT FLOWING HAIR CLUB FOR SCIENTISTS (LFHCfS)
<https://www.improbable.com/category/lfhcfs-hair-club/>
New Members:
* Auke-Florian Hiemstra
* Abhishek Upadhyay
* Zi Huang
PODCAST:
<https://www.improbable.com/category/the-weekly-improbable-research-podcast/>:
* Episode 1086: Beards and Face Punching
FACEBOOK: <http://www.facebook.com/improbableresearch>
TWITTER: @ImprobResearch, @MarcAbrahams, #IgNobel
INSTAGRAM: <https://www.instagram.com/improbable_research/>
PATREON: <www.patreon.com/ImprobableResearch>
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11 Men’s Search for Meaning: Legos Revisited
This month’s slightly-less-randomly selected research report is:
“Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos Revisited,” Michael Choi, University of St. Andrews undergraduate research paper, 2015.
<https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1014&context=student-works>
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TREAT YOURSELF TO (MUCH) MORE IMPROBABLE STUFF.
SUBCRIBE TO THE (PDF) MAGAZINE!
<www.improbable.com/magazine/>
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20 SOME IMPROBABLE EVENTS
PREMIERE: Improbable Conversations (online) Jan 20, 2022
32nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Sep 2022
[All live events in 2021 and 2022 are subject to pandemical constraints and adventures.]
For details and additional events, see
<http://www.improbable.com/improbable-research-shows/complete-schedule/>
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30 — Subscribe to the Actual Magazine! (*)
The Annals of Improbable Research is a 6-issues-per-year magazine,
in PDF form.
It’s packed with research that makes people laugh, then think.
<www.improbable.com/magazine/>
SUBSCRIPTIONS ($25, for six issues)
BACK ISSUES ($5 each)
(mini-AIR, the thing you are reading at this moment, is but a tiny, free-floating appendix to the actual magazine.)
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31 — How to start or stop receiving this newsletter (*)
This newsletter, Mini-AIR, is just a (free!) tiny monthly *supplement* to the big, bold six-times-a-year magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE to mini-AIR, see the links at the end of this email.
ARCHIVES: <http://improbable.com/airchives/miniair>
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32 — CONTACT INFO (*)
Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
<www.improbable.com>
EDITORIAL:
SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS: improbable.com>
Cambridge, MA, USA
Twitter: @ImprobResearch
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33 — Standard Gobbledegook (*)
EDITOR: Marc Abrahams
CO-CONSPIRATORS: Kees Moeliker, Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Gary Dryfoos, Nan Swift, Stephen Drew
PROOFREADER: Ambient Happenstance
AUTHORITY FIGURES: Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschbach, Sheldon Glashow, Richard Roberts
Key words: improbable research, science humor, Ig Nobel, AIR, the
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