I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune. It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless Wi’ Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I’m no’ juist as bauld as aince I wes. If you recognize the first stanza from Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1926 poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks At A Thistle’ you may also […]
Tag: drunk
What is it like to be a (drunken) bat? [two studies]
Driving whilst under the influence of alcohol is widely regarded as dangerous. So, perhaps flying whilst intoxicated, if you’re, say, a fruit bat, might be unwise too? Two scientific research groups have experimentally tested the flying performance of fruit bats whilst tipsy (the bats, not the researchers). But the results are, if not contradictory, somewhat […]
A Drunkard’s Walk Around Nice (with a mathematical solution)
“An inebriated person in Nice (see Figure 1) takes a walk, each step in one of the four cardinal directions, north (N), south (S), east (E), and west (W). We are interested in those walks beginning at the center of the Promenade des Anglais (at the southern end of town) and ending anywhere on the […]
Deterring hospital patients from ‘drinking’ from hand sanitizers – Dr. Weiner’s solution
Aside from causing the occasional fire, alcohol-based hand santizers in hospitals have another problem. They’re a handy ‘non-beverage’ source of (jellified) alcohol for those patients who crave intoxication. There are several published formal investigations on the subject – see, for example : Consumption of alcohol-based hand sanitisers by hospital inpatients The Medical journal of Australia […]
Drunk German Speech [podcast 68]
Until not so long ago, if you wanted a public corpus of alcoholized German speech, you would have been up a creek, so to speak, without a corpus. That situation has changed — as we see (or hear) in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic […]
The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech
Collectors of alcoholized German speech, rejoice! A new corpus is available to you: “Alcohol Language Corpus. The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech,” Florian Schiel [pictured here], Christian Heinrich, and Sabine Barfüßer, Language Resources and Evaluation, 2011. The authors, at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, explain: “The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) […]
Drink | drunk | hungover (studies)
Scenario: You’re on holiday. You drink heavily. What are the factors that might contribute towards a hangover? Such a question was asked by researchers Morten Hesse and Sébastien Tutenges of the University of Aarhus, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Copenhagen Division, Denmark, who performed a 2010 observational prospective study with a total of 112 […]
Drunk philosophers, studied in a bar in France
Ig Nobel Prize winner Laurent Bègue and colleague Aaron Duke have a new study about the effect of drunkenness on philosophy. The study is: “The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas,” Aaron A. Duke and Laurent Bègue, Cognition, 134 (2015): 121-127. The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology was awarded to Laurent […]
Partially drunk people can appear more attractive
There’s yet another twist in research news about drunkenness and the perception of beauty. The 2013 Ig Nobel psychology prize was awarded to Laurent Bègue [FRANCE], Brad Bushman [USA, UK, the NETHERLANDS, POLAND], Oulmann Zerhouni [FRANCE], Baptiste Subra [FRANCE], and Medhi Ourabah [FRANCE], for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they […]
How many drinks does it take you to feel drunk?
The answer, it seems, depends on many factors. Gender for example, and also when you ask(ed) the drinkers. A report in the journal Addiction, (Volume 101, Issue 10, pages 1428–1437, October 2006) examined the 1979, 1995 and 2000 US National Alcohol Surveys, and found that : “The mean reported number of drinks to feel drunk […]