“Are People Bad Singers?”, in the special Music issue of the Annals of Improbable Research, gathers research about that high-pitched question. Read the article free (PDF). Then, if you dare, purchase the issue, or subscribe to the magazine.
Tag: bad
The bad news sandwich
To set the scene, an Improbable joke. Doctor : “Ah, Mr. Smith, we have some good news and some bad news, which do you want first?” Mr. Smith : “Gimme the bad news doc.” Doctor : “We amputated the wrong foot.” Mr. Smith : “Agggggh ! – And the good news?” Doctor: “The other one’s […]
Assessing the taste of medicine
This study probes in some detail the sentiment that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”: “The bad taste of medicines: overview of basic research on bitter taste,” Julie A. Mennella [pictured here], Alan C. Spector, Danielle R. Reed, and Susan E. Coldwell, Clinical therapeutics, vol. 35, no. 8 (2013): 1225-1246. The authors, […]
A tour of the Museum of Bad Art
The CBS Sunday Morning television program paid a visit to our friends and colleagues at the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA): BONUS: Back in 2003, CBS Sunday Morning, which was in those wordy days called CBS News Sunday Morning, visited to the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony [though there seems not to be video of that online]. And […]
‘Praying to stop being an atheist’ (paper)
Dr. Tim Mawson is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Peter’s College, Oxford, UK. He’s the author of ‘Praying to stop being an atheist’ (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, June 2010, Volume 67, Issue 3, pp 173-186) “In this paper, I argue that atheists who think that the issue of God’s existence or […]
“God-awful… figures from cutting-edge published research”
LFHCfS (Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists) member Erika Woolsey alerts us to the existence of the Bad Figure blog, which collects “God-awful good-for-nothing figures from cutting-edge published research”. Here is one of Bad Figure’s many items: Figure 1 Comparison of ratios of DNABIT Compress with existing algorithms Rajarajeswari, P., & Apparao, A. (2011). DNABIT […]
“Mere Exposure to Bad Art” and The Museum of Bad Art
A new study may be of special interest to anyone who visits The Museum of Bad Art. The study is “Mere Exposure to Bad Art,” Aaron Meskin, Mark Phelan, Margaret Moore, and Matthew Kieran, British Journal of Aesthetic, vol. 53, no. 2 (2013): 139-164. The authors, at the University of Leeds, Lawrence University, and the […]
Some vexed machines
Donald Simanek compiled a long, yet undoubtedly very, very partial list of patents for machines that do not and, by their nature, cannot work as described. (Thanks to investigator Timmy Barton for bringing it to our attention.) Here’s one item: 1857 [No. 1330] Peter Armand le Comte de Fontainemoreau of London, Agent. Hydraulic motor. The “bucket […]
Most Bad Singers Aren’t Tone Deaf
Despite what you may have heard, acoustical analysis suggests that (1) most people are not horrible singers, and (2) most horrible singers are not tone deaf – they’re just horrible singers. In 2007, Isabelle Peretz and Jean-François Giguère of the University of Montreal, and Simone Dalla Bella, of the University of Finance and Management in […]
Vampirical science (Freese!)
The word “vampirical” used as an un-admiring description of a scientific claim, has been credited to Jeremy Freese [pictured here], who wrote: “Part of what makes the Trivers-Willard hypothesis perhaps more ‘vampirical’ than ’empirical’—unable to be killed by mere evidence—is that the hypothesis seems so logically compelling that it becomes easy to presume that it must […]