A business Powerpoint presentation — apparently genuinely made by someone at a company called Softbank — includes this educational image of a goose with a caption that says “Goose was not valued.” Call it a metaphor, call it whatever you like, this Powerpoint slide brings renewed meaning to the old business phrase “goosing the numbers”. […]
The claims made in lawsuits – and the need to verify or disprove them – sometimes spark interesting research. The Acoustical Society of America’s Fall 2017 meeting included a report titled, “Sound pressures generated by exploding eggs”. Investigators Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blohn began this research thanks to a lawsuit: A restaurant had hard-boiled […]
Mahadevan, who won an Ig Nobel Physics Prize in 2007 for studying how/why wrinkled sheets become wrinkled, has a new study out about how/why bird eggs become bird-egg shaped. The study, by Mahadevan and several collaborators, is: “Avian Egg Shape: Form, Function, and Evolution,” Mary Caswell Stoddard, Ee Hou Yong, Derya Akkaynak, Catherine Sheard, Joseph […]
Have you ever wondered why a hard-boiled egg, or a pool ball, spinning on a countertop and passing through a puddle of milk, draws milk up the side of the egg and then ejects it at the maximum radius? So did Ken Langley, Jeff Hendricks, Matthew Elverud, Dan Maynes and Tadd Truscott of Brigham Young […]