The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the Mandarin Chinese language. The study is: “Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a),” Shuang […]
Some children especially, and some adults especially especially, love to find a way to pronounce names so that those names sound “naughty” (vulgar) — which makes those children and adults (and their friends) laugh and laugh and laugh. The beetle whose official scientific name is Ceratoderus fukuii is an example of this. The second word […]
Serendipity and the Ig Nobel Prize — Tonight I, the American founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, was having dinner with two Dutch Ig Nobel Prize winners (Ida Sabelis and Kees Moeliker) in an Italian Restaurant in the city of Essen, Germany (where we and another Ig winner are doing a show tomorrow night, Friday, […]
There are many twists in the story of how Joanne Mikl estimated the inertial properties of athletes who do somersaults. Mikl explains some of them, in this study: “Methods Of Estimating Athlete Inertial Properties And Their Implications For The Study Of Somersaults,” Joanne Mikl, ISBS-Conference Proceedings Archive, vol. 1, no. 1. 2013.