Ig Nobel Prize winner Daniel Bonn, together with colleagues Menno Demmenie and Stefan Kooij, celebrates the winter holiday season by playing with ice. They explain: “We love ice; not just because we are based in the Netherlands, where we yearn for skating on frozen canals, but also because of its fascinating physics. This December, we […]
Some homeowners in the USA deploy more Christmas ornamentation than other homeowners, a statistical fact explored in a study, published in 1987, about one of the statistical outliers. That study is: “It’s the Thought That Counts: A Case Study in Xmas Excesses“, Richard W. Pollay, Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 14, 1987, pp. 140-143. The […]
Here’s the abstract of a 2017 study by Professor Brendan Kelly, Consultant Psychiatrist at Tallaght Hospital, School of Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Background: Christmas “is the season to be jolly” but, despite many recent studies of happiness and wellbeing, the population distribution of jollity is unknown. Aims: To assess levels of jollity across Europe, […]
This Christmas we forgot, as we do every year, to publish Stephen Leacock’s “Caroline’s Christmas, or the Inexplicable Infant.” Here, three days late, is a snippet: “…The Old Homestead was mortgaged! Ten years ago, reckless with debt, crazed with remorse, mad with despair and persecuted with rheumatism, John Enderby had mortgaged his farmstead for twenty-four dollars […]