Does this video, showing sound sculptor Henry Dagg performing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ on a Faux-Katzenklavier of his own construction, qualify as a fictophonic collapse scenario? First, some background. Musicologists often like to categorise instruments into classes or groups. For example – idiophones (vibrating bodies), membranophones (vibrating membranes), chordophones (vibrating strings), aerophones (vibrating […]
Tag: cat
Podcast 29: Eat a shrew, and an epidemic of penile amputations
The secret of why onions make people cry; the scientist who ate and excreted a shrew; the one-armed man who was arrested for applauding; the question of when cows lie down and stand up; and surgical management of an epidemic of penile amputations in Siam; and a cat unexpectedly taking over the podcast — all these all […]
Prize-winning cat-on-your-keyboard detector
Here’s an appreciative look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning cat-on-your-keyboard detector. Zachary Crockett writes, on the Priceonomics blog: The Software That Detects When a Cat Is Messing with Your Keyboard … While 140 Ig Nobel prizes have been doled out in history, only one has been awarded in the category of “computer science.” This distinct honor goes […]
Cat dropping, for curiosity’s sake
The Skull in the Stars blog writes about the practice, back when, of cat turning: One thing I’ve learn from studying the history of science is that scientists are human beings. Often incredibly weird, weird human beings. For example: in the mid-to-late-1800s, an exciting era in which the foundations of electromagnetic theory were set and […]