This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Double standards— World Standards Day 2023 will arrive soon, two days after it arrives. As Feedback noted last year (17 September 2022), having double Standards Days is standard behaviour. This year, most of the world will officially celebrate […]
Historic video: An hour of improbable research, presented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] in 2014—with Marc Abrahams [founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony] and Theo Gray [2002 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner for inventing the 4-legged periodic table table.] Here’s the official NIST description of this event: Dung beetles finding […]
User interface issues are not glamorous — but they do matter. Many irksome problems linger for years or decades. Sam Byford reports, in The Verge, on a cleansing case: Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls The Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, a consortium of companies producing plumbing products including Toto, Panasonic, and […]
This year, 2016, World Standards Day was on Friday, October 14. One of the competing official announcements says: Each year on 14 October, the members of the IEC, ISO and ITU celebrate World Standards Day, which is a means of paying tribute to the collaborative efforts of the thousands of experts worldwide who develop the […]
Feces, faeces, ordure, dung, manure, excreta, stool, stool-NOT-faeces, and stool-NOT-feces are the prime examples in a newly published study that examines the need for data-driven standards. The study is: “Laying a Community-Based Foundation for Data-Driven Semantic Standards in Environmental Health Sciences,” Carolyn J. Mattingly, Rebecca Boyles, Cindy P. Lawler, Astrid C. Haugen, Allen Dearry, and Melissa Haendel, Environmental […]
Be aware that there is no ISO standard for this: “A New Bride Presented Her Dad With a “Virginity Certificate” At Her Wedding” — October 22, 2015 report, in Mic BONUS: In 2015, as in previous years, there is also no universally adhered-to standard for the date of World Standards Day.
Here’s video of the colloquium talk I did a few days ago at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg Maryland. The official description: “A Measure of Improbable Research — haphazardly selected samples of Ig Nobel Prize-winning and other research that makes people LAUGH then THINK”. The talk was broadcast live to NIST facilities in […]
Today’s cogno-intellectual exercise: Compare and contrast Non-Uniform Day with World Standards Day
Today, two odes to British Tea. First, the British Standards Organization’s official six-page standard for how to brew a cup of tea. It was honored with the 1999 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature. Second, Professor Elemental’s music video “Cup of Brown Joy”:
Charles Mahron’s “Confessions of a recovering engineer“, in Grist magazine, is itself a well-engineered essay. (Thanks to investigator Ethel Saylor for bringing this to our attention.)