It’s Edinburgh tonight for the 2012 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK. This will be a special “Improbable After Dark” show, at Counting House, 36 West Nicolson Street. Expect an all-star cast of scientists, journalists, and entertainers each doing exceedingly-brief readings from genuine, improbable scientific studies. If you are easily offended by anything, do not come to this […]
Punk, Post-punk and Socrates
It’s possible that it was none other than Socrates himself who (according to Plato) first outlined the inherent problems regarding classifications. He chose, as an example, the classification of bees. ‘What is the nature of the bee? […] Do bees differ as bees? […] Tell me, what is the quality in which they do not […]
The art of short-circuiting (a metaphorical coconut)
Qubais Reed Ghazala explains how he builds new kinds of instruments by carefully bending, twisting, or otherwise deforming or even breaking things that were designed to be other than what Ghazala eventually had in mind for them. He wrote a study: “The Folk Music of Chance Electronics: Circuit-Bending the Modern Coconut,” Qubais Reed Ghazala, Leonardo […]
Octopus goes twice as fast, with a wheel
How fast does an octopus typically run in an exercise wheel? That has yet to be determined. But one value is reported in the study: “Cutaneous Respiration in Octopus Vulgaris,” J.J. Madan and M.J. Wells, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 199, pp. 2477–2483 (1996). The authors, at the University of Cambridge, UK, explain, citing two […]