“Q”. Just Q. That’s the whole title. Plus other terse titles.

This paper qualifies in the competition, if there is one, for Research Paper with the Shortest Title. The paper is: “Q“, by  Leon Knopoff [pictured here], Reviews of  Geophysics, vol. 2, no. 4, 1964, pp. 625-660.  The author, at the Department of Physics and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, begins: […]

Short men get more sex, they say

Here’s a recent exercise in data collection: “Sexual Activity of Young Men is Not Related to Their Anthropometric Parameters,” Imre Rurik [pictured here, below], Attila Varga, Ferenc Fekete, Timea Ungvári and János Sándor, Journal of Sexual Medicine, epub June 21, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Ivan Oransky for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at […]

Ig Nobel winner writes “best abstract ever”

Twitterings call it the “best abstract ever“. The lead author, Michael Berry, was awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in physics (together with Andre Geim) for using magnets to levitate a frog. This new paper is a response to the recent reported measurements of neutrinos that apparently traveled faster than the speed of light. Here’s […]

The ever-shortening name: When CQU?

A linguistics question: Predict the year when this university will shorten its name to be just three letters long. Here’s Wikipedia’s history of the name changes so far: CQUniversity started out as the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia) in 1967, and after two years under the name of the University College of Central Queensland, in 1992 became […]