The 1994 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics was awarded to the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don’t repent. Click here for additional details, including a method to calculate your chance of going to hell.
Tag: people
Are People Bad Singers?
“Are People Bad Singers?”, in the special Music issue of the Annals of Improbable Research, gathers research about that high-pitched question. Read the article free (PDF). Then, if you dare, purchase the issue, or subscribe to the magazine.
Smelly people in the office [podcast #78]
Smelly people in the smelly workplace — that’s the dilemma and joy of this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by FYFD fluid dynamicist Nicole Sharp — tells about: Hugging and what it means, maybe — “Smell Organization: Bodies and Corporeal Porosity in Office Work,” Kathleen Riach […]
“Inelegant Mathematics and Worse Social Science?”
For a while, a long while ago, some people thought they would soon make computers simulate the ways people behave with each other. This paper, published in 1974, suggested that maybe such things would not be simple or easy: “Computer Simulations: Inelegant Mathematics and Worse Social Science?“, Hayward R. Alker, International Journal of Mathematical Education […]