It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match? Would they dish […]
The Ebbinghaus illusion (a.k.a. Titchener circles) is a robust optical illusion discovered more than 100 years ago. Two identically-sized* circles are presented, one is surrounded by large circles, the other by small circles. The one surrounded by small circles looks bigger. In 2012, a research group from Purdue University, the Max Planck Institute and the […]
Q. What is this man doing? A. He is strenuously tackling a ‘Scrummaging Machine’ developed at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Q. Why is he doing that? A. In order to assist with an experimental study into the effect of variations in the alignment of the feet on scrum kinetics during machine scrummaging. Q. […]
If you thought that ‘Score Celebration Injuries’ (SCIs) were restricted to soccer players – think again. A 2017 report in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 57(3 ): 267-71, reviews the medical literature on the subject, reporting that of the 62 SCIs that they found, only 22 involved professional soccer players. “A total […]
Can there be a mathematical definition of excitement? Within the realm of sports at least (particularly tennis) an attempt has been made to find out. Dr Graham Pollard BSc, MSC, PhD of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canberra, Australia, has written, in the Journal of Sports Analytics, regarding ‘Measuring excitement in sport’. […]
“There is no known mechanical apparatus enabling a human being to walk in a prone position, like a lizard, like a spider, close to the ground, using arms and legs as will be made possible with the Quadra Walker (QW) disclosed herein.” Its inventor, Herbert Russell Burnham of Chula Vista, California, explains in a newly […]
There is a growing body of research into the effects of ‘grunting’ in sports. Previous studies have mostly investigated tennis grunts *, but now a new investigation has examined grunting in karate. A team from the psychology departments at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, US, and the University of British Columbia, Canada, measured the […]
“The medial [sic] appeal of table tennis seems to go down in terms of TV hours, at least outside Asia. One of the reasons is the fact that the speed of the game is nowadays so high that it is very hard for spectators to follow the balls.” So, in terms of slowing down the […]
In the previous item in this series Improbable looked at the question of whether ‘praying to win’ at sports might be ‘unsporting’. One aspect (which wasn’t mentioned) is a possible scenario whereby those who pray to win might gain an advantage by a kind-of ‘Divine Placebo’ effect – that’s to say they might try just […]
The clip above shows (amongst others) the now-famous 2014 FIFA World Cup biting-incident featuring Luis Suárez. One might ask, and indeed some have, what are the ethical and philosophical implications of such an act? Bearing in mind that : “A prohibition against biting an opponent is not included in the rules of most contact sports, […]