“Fishes caused Sweden to be afraid of being attacked by Soviet submarines in 1982” is a report by VN Express (in Vietnamese) about the secret incident that years later produced the 2004 Ig Nobel Biology Prize. The central figures in the story: farting herring. It is an open question, biologically speaking, whether the herring do […]
Tag: farts
High Altitude Flatus Expulsion (a.k.a. Rocky Mountain Barking Spiders)
One of the side effects of venturing to high altitudes (or any environment where the air pressure is lower than normal, say, for example inside a passenger airplane at cruising height) is an increase in the expellation of intestinal gases. As a number of our readers will no doubt be aware, the syndrome was first […]
Robots make things funnier
Can robots do stand-up? Or, more specifically, can a robot make manzai (Japanese stand-up comedy) seem funnier? Dr. Jonas Sjöbergh, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Knowledge Media Laboratory of Hokkaido University, Japan, has been working on the question since 2008. And, in association with colleague professor Kenji Araki, a paper was produced for LNAI 5447, […]
Musicology 101: “Farmer plays… hand farts”
Music history, capture on video long ago, presented now by the Internet Archive, and described by the Public Domain Review: “Universal Newsreel from 1933 showing Cecil H. Dill, a farmer from Traverse Coty, Michigan, demonstrating his ability to render popular melodies by pressing his hands together. After the performance, which seems to be of Yankee […]
Fish farts, Russian submarines, the Swedish Foreign Minister
Maggie Koerth-Baker of Boing-Boing interviewed several journalists at the AAAS Annual Meeting last week in Vancouver, about what they had learned at the meeting. Here’s me, blabbing on about a new little chapter in the story of how fish farts almost caused a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Sweden, and might cause a new little kerfuffle […]
Farts in folktales
It was mid winter when Till Eulenspiegel arrived at Ascherleben. Times were hard, but finally he found a furrier who was willing to take on an apprentice, and he was put to work sewing pelts. Not being accustomed to the smell of the curing hides, he said, “Pew! Pew! You are as white as chalk, […]