On Saturday, July 1, 2023 the first-ever Improbable Dramatic Readings event in Poland will happen, as part of Bazyliszek, in Warsaw. Mikołaj Kowalewski will compere. BACKGROUND: What Is/Are Improbable Dramatic Readings? Here’s what happens at this kind of event. Luminaries (of various wattage) each do brief dramatic readings from seemingly absurd, genuine research studies and patents. […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: A sick experiment —The phrase “what goes up must come down” isn’t obviously relevant to the insides of a cat. The countervailing “what goes down must come up” is, when that cat has swallowed something of dubious […]
Roland Eberlein tells some of the history of how people tried and sometimes succeeded at supplying the wind for bigger and bigger pipe organs. His essay “Technique of the Organ, ” published by the Walcker Foundation for Organ Research, goes into detail about some of the largest improvements: “The sound of the medieval organ must […]
This week’s ambiguously-worded science headline: “Profitability and Cost Analysis for Contract Broiler Production in Turkey,”by Suleyman Karaman, Yavuz Taşcıoğlu, and Osman Doğan Bulut, Animals, vol. 13, no. 13, 2023. The authors are based at Akdeniz University and Iğdır University, Turkey.
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Not such a comfort — To see how a man’s stress levels and diet might alter his shape, one might give comfort food to a stressed rat and study its penis. Researchers at the State University of […]
“The Nonequilibrium Nature of Culinary Evolution,” by Osame Kinouchi, Rosa W. Diez-Garcia, Adriano J. Holanda, Pedro Zambianchi, and Antonio C. Roque, is one of the research studies featured in the article “Food Formulas and Recipes“, in the special Formulas & Recipes issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research). Read the article online. And if you […]
Eugenie Scott and I had a fun talk, for an online meeting of the Bay Area Skeptics, about the Ig Nobel Prizes. This happened on June 8, 2023. Here’s video:
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Power meringue — Researchers in South Korea and the US have cooked up a recipe for meringue that you can then use to make electrical batteries…. Public relations equation — “It will cost up to $21.5 […]
This week’s pleasingly-worded science headline: “Ancient extinct skink was orders of magnitude bigger than any skink alive today“. It appears over a June 14, 2023 report by Phys.org about research done in Australia.
The Ig Nobel Prize-winning “invisible gorilla” guys have a new book coming out. The book is about con men — about how (1) everyone can get conned, and (2) anyone can learn to not get conned so often. Dan Simons and Chris Chabris‘s new book is called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and […]