Lee Kuan Yew, who was awarded the 1994 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology, has died, say numerous press reports. His Ig Nobel citation said that the prize honored: “Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever […]
History of surveying: Berlin Spy Tunnel
This document, billed as a US government secret history of a surveillance tunnel dug in Berlin during the cold war (“Clandestine Services History: The Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952-1956“, CS document #150), tells of a difficult moment for the surveyors: The lack of an adequate base line made the surveying problem especially difficult. The engineers decided […]
The Ho Ho Classification and Nomenclature Committee Report
Copies of this report on Ho Ho Classification and Nomenclature are now hard to come by: “The Ho Ho Classification and Nomenclature Committee Report,” Johan Kamminga, Maxine Kleindienst, Ruthann Knudson, and Robert Lawrence, Lithic Use-wear Analysis, 1979, pp. 133-35. BONUS (unrelated): Huh
Professional Football Player by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night
John Urschel is not your ordinary National Football League offensive lineman. He may be a professional football player by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His latest paper has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that his paper had […]