This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Politicians and ChatGPT — A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility. Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by […]
L. Mahadevan, who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in physics for studying how sheets get wrinkled, wrote a loving tribute, a few months ago, to his teacher Joseph Keller [pictured here]. Keller is a two-time Ig Nobel Prize winner. The entire essay appears in SIAM News. Here are snippets: Joe Keller’s contributions to the […]
It was back in 2009 when professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium, acquired the Ig Nobel prize for physics – for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip. Coincidentally (or not, as the case may be), in that very same year the teapot spout drip […]
“How useless is a chocolate teapot?” ask The Naked Scientists, who then answer the question to their own — and perhaps also to your — satisfaction, documenting it with photos and a video. (Thanks to investigator David Kessler for bringing this to our attention.)