Annmarie Throckmorton sent us this note today, expressing her level of delight at the Ig Nobel Prizes: And Science wonders why more little girls don’t go into STEM education. The answer for Improbable is that no one wants to be publicly called “poo” which is a synonym for SHIT. How mean and stupid are you? […]
Tag: happy
The Personalities of Numbers [part 2 of 3]
Some numbers might be Evil or Odious but others are Happy. A Happy number can be described like this: “If you iterate the process of summing the squares of the decimal digits of a number, then it is easy to see that you either reach the cycle 4→16→37→58→89→145→42→20→4 or arrive at 1. In the latter case […]
Personifications of Death and Death Anxiety Survey
A look back at yet another presumably surprising discovery: “Personifications of Death and Death Anxiety,” Richard Lonetto, Journal of Personality Assessment, vol. 46, no. 4, 1982. The author, at the University of Guelph, explains: “University students, graduate nursing students, and funeral service students completed Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) and a Death Personification Exercise (DPE). […]
Raising Happy Children for Dummies
As with another book we perused, Asperger’s Syndrome For Dummies, you might wonder if there are lots of complaints about the title of this book: Raising Happy Children for Dummies. You might wonder how the title is meant to be parsed. You might wonder who buys the book, and for what reasons. You might wonder all sorts […]