A quality that any book can have: Years after it’s been published, new people discover, happily, that it exists. Here’s a recent review, in the Twaddle blog, of the book This Is Improbable. The reviewer says, in part: From sky lizards to exploding meat, the research covered in this book is the epitome of eclectic, […]
Kelsey Dobson and Stephen Lindeman attended a lecture by David Hu, who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize this year for his research on urination duration in mammals. Dobson and Lindeman each then reviewed what they had seen and hears:
Tom Holliman reviewed the Improbable Research weekly podcast. The review appears in the April 2015 issue of The Psychologist: The Annals of Improbable Research, the magazine dedicated to research that ‘makes people laugh and then think’, has recently launched a weekly podcast, ‘Improbable Research’, which is sure to be a massive hit with anyone interested in […]
Restaurant reviews, some of them — especially the reviews written by non-professionals — have taken on new importance. They can be a means of identifying illnesses that otherwise go unreported to health officials. Mary McKenna (who is sometimes known professionally as “Scary Disease Girl”), writing on The Plate blog, explains: Yelp Helps NYC Health Department Track Foodborne […]
Interesting perspective, you may think to yourself, if you read this noted psychiatrist‘s review of a book about the science related to excrement: The book: From Food to Fertilizer, the Role of Excrement in the Life Cycle, Charles C. Dahlberg, Young Scott Books, Reading, Massachusetts, 1973. The review: “Not So Execrable,” Richard A. Gardner, Contemporary Psychoanalysis […]
‘This is the kind of book that makes you want to read out snippets to whoever is near. I did this so often that my husband quickly became exasperated and took the book away from me. However, within 10 minutes of him starting to read it, he was doing exactly the same thing’. —So says reader […]
Several Improbable Research persons (I am one of them) are at CERN for a few days. We sometimes dine in CERN’s main cafeteria, and are delighted at the goodness of the food and the general atmosphere — and equally delighted at the kindness, friendliness, and relaxed cheeriness of the people who work at the cafeteria. It’s […]
When a web site gathers book reviews automatically, having a computer do it flatly by recipe, the results sometimes come out like this, from the Cakitches web site: Haslam, Nick. Kinds of Kinds: A Conceptual Taxonomy of Psychiatric Categories Philosophy, Psychiatry,” e Psychology – Volume 9, Number 3, September 2002, pp. 203-217 The Johns Hopkins […]
The Retraction Watch blog tells of a resourceful, if not altogether successful, person. The report begins: South Korean plant compound researcher faked email addresses so he could review his own studies Scientists frustrated by the so-called “third reviewer” — the one always asking for additional experiments before recommending acceptance — might be forgiven for having fantasies […]
Jane Richards has some quibbles in her review (in the July 1980 issue of the Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners) of the book Why Suffer? Periods and Their Problems, Lynda Birke and Katy Gardner, Virago, London (1979), 68 pages): I wonder who the authors intend should read this handbook? It is an […]