Eugenie Scott and I had a fun talk, for an online meeting of the Bay Area Skeptics, about the Ig Nobel Prizes. This happened on June 8, 2023. Here’s video:
Tag: history
A look back at a look back for Murphy’s Law
Is it possible to track down the actual detail of a single historical fact? Nick Spark tried. He published his discoveries first in the Annals of Improbable Research (volume 9, number 9), then in expanded form in a book. Three people he discovered—Murphy is one of them—shared an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for (probably) […]
Laboratory News looks at almost 30 years of Ig Nobel stuff
There’s lots of quasi-juicy Ig Nobel history in this profile, in the British publication Laboratory News, by Jonathan Chadwick:
Recalling Experiments Past – Reciting poetry to a flame to see what happens
Somewhere round or about the late 1850s, John Tyndall FRS [* see note below] was developing and perfecting his experiments with “Sensitive Flames”. He describes one such experiment in his book ‘Sounds’ (p. 238). In which he reads a passage of poetry from Edmund Spenser’s ‘Belphœbe the Huntress’ to the flame (which he calls The Vowel-flame) […]
The Kidney Stone of Alderman Adams
The History of Parliament blog detects a connection between Ig Nobel Prize-winning roller-coaster/kidney stone research and, yes, the history of Britain’s parliament: The Kidney Stone of Alderman Adams The link between the Ig Nobel Prize for improbable research and the 1640-1660 Section of the History of Parliament Trust is not immediately obvious; but the Ig Nobel […]
‘Sort of’ – academic study
When did English-speaking people start saying “sort of”? The phrase can be found at least as far back as 1788 – as is explained in this paper ‘History of the sort of construction family’ (presented at ICCG2: Second International Conference on Construction Grammar, Helsinki.) by David Denison FBA, Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University […]
Alternate histories of the universe
There are many alternate histories of the universe. Here are two. A Briefer History of the Universe Eric Schulman’s 60-second-long History of the Universe began as a print piece (“A History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less,” in the Jan/Feb 1997 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research), had its first public performance as […]
“Ecco il fico” — Barbarossa, the fig, the bite, the thumb, and the mule
The phrase “Ecco il fico” has a particularly ripe meaning, writes Rob Chirico in the Strong Language blog: The year was 1162 when he returned and easily subdued the revolt. According to the chronicler Giambattista Gelli, Frederick [Frederick the First, Holy Roman emperor, also known as “Barbarossa”] got them back for the mule debacle, and then […]
A scholarly book review — Fish and Chips: A History
Here’s a new review of a new history of fish and chips in Britain: “Book Review: Fish and Chips: A History,” Spencer Swain, Cultural Sociology, vol. 9 no. 4, December 2015, pp. 590-592. (Thanks to Dan Vergano for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at Leeds Beckett University, UK, reviews the book Fish and […]
Puritan values: Revised history of Harvard and Yale Universities
Puritan State University tells its own history, and also its own history of two other universities: Brief History As were the cases wherein Reverend Harvard founded Harvard University and Rev. Yale, the Yale University in the states, so was Dr. Si Hwa Chang who likewise, as nationalist and a true believer of the Puritan martyr spirit, who […]