Joe Staton’s classic article “Tastes Like Chicken” was the subject of a question on the September 25, 2013 edition of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” TV program: The question posed to contestants on that program: “Since the animals are thought to be distant relatives, biology professor Joe Staton once wrote ‘chances are that […]
Introducing a concept: Hortiporn
What is Hortipornography? We can do no better than consult the word’s coiners – Dr. Paul Hewer, now Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Strathclyde University, Scotland, and Professor Douglas Brownlie, at the University of Stirling, Scotland, who originated the term in their paper ‘Constructing Hortiporn: On the Aesthetics of Stylized Exteriors’ (in: Advances in Consumer […]
It’s a bit livelier than other ceremonies… [video]
Someone in the audience took this 18-second-long video — a view from the balcony at the start of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony:
Trussed by too-easily trusting data?
Jean-Claude Bradley writes in the Useful Chemistry blog: I’m not sure what my students expected before taking my Chemical Information Retrieval class this fall. My guess is that most just wanted to learn how to use databases to quickly find “facts”. From what I can gather much of their education has consisted of teachers giving […]