John Trinkaus, who was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, got some recent attention for his how-well-do-people-guess-at-passwords research. The Chinese Apple site produced this video about that: Here’s a machine translation into English of part of what it says: “John Trinkaus, a professor at […]
Tag: number
WHO says: No who, no where
Innocuity is now a recommended goal in naming a disease. “Discovered a disease? WHO has new rules for avoiding offensive names” is the headline on a report by Kai Kupferschmidt, in ScienceInsider. It says, in part: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another […]
The Fanciful Number 2.9013, Plus or Minus Nothing
Ig Nobel Prize (psychology, 2012) winner Rolf Zwaan writes, in his blog, about the vaunted — yet uncertain — value of a particular number: The Fanciful Number 2.9013, Plus or Minus Nothing Can we capture any aspect of human psychology in a single number? In 1956 a paper entitled The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two saw the light. […]
Erdos tells a joke
Mathematician Paul Erdos, he of the Erdos number, tells a joke: Here are some Erdos links: Reminiscences of Paul Erdos The Erdos Number Project Erdos and XKCD The book of books about Erdos: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers The Erdos centennial, in Hungary The documentary “Erdos — N Is a Number”: Paul Hoffman, author of […]