True art or a fake?Famous or unknown?Great prose or crap?Machine translation or Faulkner?MIDI or Virtuoso?These and other surprising quizzes are the work of Mikhail Simkin (co-author of " Do Copied Citations Create Renowned Papers?" which appeared in AIR 11-1).
Dogged success for Ig winner
The Spanish automatic dog-washing machine that was honored with the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize (in the field of hygiene) is now enjoying great success in America, according to a May 13, 2005 news report from the Associated Press: Dog washing machine has pooches in a spin–Contraption provides hands-free, wash and dry cycles– A washing machine […]
Hoagland’s further bold exploration
There is news about Richard Hoagland, the man who won the 1997 Ig Nobel Astronomy Prize "for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon." [For details of that work, see the book The Monuments of Mars […]
Fieggen’s shoelace technicalities
Ian Fieggen maintains a compendium of technical knowledge about shoelaces. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for bringing this to our attention.)