Sometimes it’s almost not worth trying to decide whether something is a hoax or not—whether, to say it in old-fashioned phrasing, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Vaev Tissues seems to fit snugly into this indecisively gooey category. Mandy Oaklander writes about it, whatever it is, in Time magazine: A Mysterious Company Claims to Sell Sneeze-Filled […]
Tag: hoax
Professor Dreier’s Academic Drivel Report
Peter Dreier, who is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles, confesses his sins and exposes his academic hoax in a Feb 2016 article for The American Prospect Magazine entitled: Academic Drivel Report “Six years ago I submitted a […]
Gibberish scholarship happily fills the cracks, again
Comes another reminder that some scholarly journals, like some people, are less careful than others. [Another way to put this: if the ONLY thing you know about a report is that it was published in “a scholarly journal”, then you know almost nothing about it.] Richard van Noorden reports, in Nature: The publishers Springer and IEEE are […]
Things that sneak into the literature: Stuperspace
Odd bits of concoction occasionally find their way into otherwise somber research journals. Here’s one example: “Stuperspace,” V. Gates, Empty Kangaroo, M. Roachcock, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, vol. 15, nos. 1–2, February 1985, pp. 289–293. The abstract says: “We prove, once and for all, that people who don’t use superspace are really out of it. […]
Ig Nobel winner Pat Robertson makes another prediction
Pat Robertson, who shared the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics, has made a new prediction, this time about climate change. Robertson won his Ig Nobel for predicting the world would end in 1982, thus (eventually) teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations. His co-winners each made their own erroneous predictions […]
The great geoduck hoax photo
Peter Smith, in the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog, tells of the great geoduck hoax photo. Here’s a copy of that photo: [via Annalee Newitz]
Wrestling women & Aztec mummy: Truth revealed
We have it on good authority that this film sequence is not a genuine record of an anthropological study: (Thanks to investigator Stanley Eigen for bringing this to our attention.) BONUS: We do not know whether this, possibly related, film clip is a hoax:
The Legendary Dr Fox Lecture — Footage Found!
Reto Schneider, curator of the WeirdExperiments.com web site (and Reto is also Improbable Research’s Swiss Desk Chief), has made a happy discovery. Full details are on his site. Here’s how he begins the tale: Several years ago when I first wrote about the famous Dr Fox lecture I thought the original footage was lost forever. […]
What psychiatrists say your gut says
Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There’s a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people’s gut feelings – how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words. In 1984, Prof Dr med […]