We invite you to participate in The Seminal Study (also known as “The Seminal Book Question“). The Seminal Study is simple. It asks this one question: Should libraries and bookstores be required to clearly label every seminal book, with a large, easily-readable label that says “SEMINAL”? Please note that: (1) there are many seminal books, […]
David Hu, whose research on urination duration led to the 2015 Ig Nobel Physics Prize and whose research on why wombat poo is cube shaped led—three weeks ago—to the 2019 Ig Nobel Physics Prize, has this week been given a new honor: The American Institute of Physics Announces 2019 Science Communication Award Winners WASHINGTON, D.C., […]
James Joyce may not have had particularly good eyesight, but (some say) he at least partially made up for it with a heightened awareness of smells. Especially bodily ones. Which he often wrote about. In great detail. But do academic works about Joyce’s evident preoccupations with flatulence – which have led some scholars to suggest that […]
What can be done about the troublesome numbers of overdue library books? A set of strategies (10 in number) is provided by Bacon, Pamela S. in the journal Library Media Connection. For example: • ‘Never allow students to renew a book’ • ‘No matter what the question . . . always say no first’ • […]
Anyone who’s seen the phrase “This page has intentionally been left blank” and who has been left thinking that it’s a relatively modern construct – think again. Intentionally blank pages have been around, in abundance, since at least the 18th century. Dr. Anne Toner (Trinity College Cambridge, UK), has extensively researched varieties of incompleteness in […]
Why is there such a paucity of academic literature on medieval punctuation? Is it (as Reimer, 1998, suggested) “[…] partly because there is so much evidence which needs to be studied, and partly because editors of texts have considered the effort needed to be a waste of time”? For a discussion of the subject, turn […]
Emily St. John Mandel [pictured here], a former girl, who writes books, analyzed data about the many of the characters who are specifically identified as a “girl” in the title of a book. Mandel wrote up her findings for the FiveThirtyEight web site: “The Gone Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train — Why are there so many books with “girl” in […]
“We hypothesized that the quantitative and qualitative literary output of famous writers would correlate with their number of mates, children, and grandchildren. We further assumed that writing lyric poetry would be more beneficial for mating success than nonpoetry because the former consists of more verbal handicaps (e.g., rhymes) than the latter and thus requires special […]
Are E-book enthusiasts missing out on the olfactory aspects of reading a good-smelling book? The technical aspects of volatile degradation products emitted by books has been examined before, see: Improbable Research, Old books up your nose [1], but a later paper in the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management (Vol 7, 2011) goes on to examine […]
‘Graphophagia’ is a new word (or neologism if you prefer) coined by Janet Beizer who is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. It’s derived from Greek, [literally ‘writing-eating’] and refers to a type of ‘Pica‘ – specifically a subset of ‘Xylophagia’ (i.e. eating wood or paper) but whereby practitioners not only eat […]