The Ig Nobel prizes are popping up in even the most literary worlds. The Cotidianul site invites you to [here we machine translated from Romanian into English]: “read excerpts from the work of Gheorghe Schwartz – Zu Island, published by Tracus Arte Publishing House in 2016″: Radu remembers – when was that? – a discussion on […]
Tag: literature
An end at the Apostrophe
The founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, who in 2001 was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for that achievement, has announced that the Apostrophe Protection Society will come to an end. He made the announcement with a tinge of happy bitterness. A December 1, 2019 news report in the Evening Standard says: A society dedicated […]
High quality literature production and mating success
“We hypothesized that the quantitative and qualitative literary output of famous writers would correlate with their number of mates, children, and grandchildren. We further assumed that writing lyric poetry would be more beneficial for mating success than nonpoetry because the former consists of more verbal handicaps (e.g., rhymes) than the latter and thus requires special […]
The best engineered opening line ever written?
Are these not the finest opening words ever written for an engineering document — maybe for any work of literature? Be it known that I, Luther C. Barcus, of the town of Sidney, county of Champaign, and State of Illinois, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Monkey-Wrenches… That’s the beginning of the patent (US number 753837) […]
An interim report about the report about reports about reports
The winner of the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for literature has issued an update — a relatively short interim report — about progress on the report about its prize-winning report about reports about reports. That prize was awarded to The US Government General Accountability Office [US GAO], for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends […]
The more-than-seven ages of man (and woman)
William Shakespeare reduced the ages of man to a mere seven, in the play “As You Like It“. In this video, actor Benedict Cumberbatch presents that argument: In contrast, the maker of the video below went for a less literarily — but more mathematically — classical approach to age, assigning a different age for each year […]
The ubiquity of dead mules in Southern literature
Jerry Leath Mills [pictured here] reigns as the unchallenged authority on the subject of dead mules in 20th-century American southern literature. Professor Mills established his reputation – almost instantly – in 1996, with the publication of a long essay called “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century”. […]
How to write a book semi-automatically
To semi-automatically compose a non-fiction book, or several hundred thousand of them, one can observe the methods of Professor Philip M. Parker (of INSEAD), of whom we have written (semi-automatically) many times. To semi-automatically compose a work of fiction, one can learn much by reading Michelle Legro’s essay in Brain Pickings. It begins: Plotto: The Master Book […]
Plagiarize! (then, and again)
“Multiple retractions as brazen plagiarist victimizes orthopedics literature” says the headline today in the Retraction Watch blog, which gives lots and lots of juicy details: Several journals in the field of orthopedics and related disciplines have been victimized by an apparent serial plagiarist. The author, Bernardino Saccomanni, of Gabriele D’ Annunzio University, in Chieti Scalo, Italy—across […]
All literature explained in graphs
All of literature is explained, or not, in simple graphs, in this essay by Kurt Vonnegut, the younger brother of Ig Nobel Prize winner (for monography “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.”) Bernie Vonnegut. It begins: Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it […]