The influence of the Ig Nobel Prize slowly seeps into academia — especially in techniques for piquing people’s curiosity and attention. Here’s a new, 2023 example. The Harvard Gazette, in a report headlined “The snappy book talk: ‘When does that happen in academia?’ ” tells of an innovative event: “Scholars had seven minutes to explain […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: On the origin of carrots — Do you know where your carrot, if you have a carrot, comes from? A new study from the University of L’Aquila in Italy outlines one approach to finding out. “It […]
Was something wrong with Beethoven’s metronome? Well, was something wrong? Well? A fair number of people have tried hard to find out. Four of them produced this mathematics-based analysis: “Was Something Wrong with Beethoven’s Metronome?” Sture Forsén, Harry B. Gray, L.K. Olof Lindgren, and Shirley B. Gray, Notices of the AMS, vol. 60, no. 9, […]
Questions along the lines of “When does the future start?” have perplexed scholars for . . . some time. For example, do people tend to think that The Future begins immediately* after The Present, or is its arrival more ‘smeared out’? [see illustrations] Steps towards answering this puzzle have recently been taken by Professor Hal […]
Here’s Diego Golombek talking about reading and wondering about time travel—an experience that, when he was a child, excited Diego in a way that led to his eventual unusual career. Diego now studies—and experiments with—biology to try to understand some of the seemingly simply, scientifically mystifying things that happen in nature every day. This is […]
Rafael Prieto Curiel, in the mathematics magazine Chalkdust, does some rough calculations about waiting for a bus: “Let’s measure how much time I expect to wait for the next bus to arrive as I observe more or fewer passengers in the stop…. If I find zero passengers at the bus stop, 99% of the time I […]
Three Swedish researchers spent time estimating the aggregate time spent folding the corners of toilet paper. They published this study (which tells only their estimate of how much time those other people spent folding, but does not disclose how much time the authors spent calculating and writing): “It is worth 10 million working hours a year […]
Tamagotchi, whose inventors were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for economics in 1997, is celebrated by Jaime Rubio Hancock, writing in El Pais: Does not anyone remember the Tamagotchi? 6 sets which we found as harmful as Pokémon Go …This Japanese toy Bandai hooked millions of children in 1996. It was not more than a small […]
The decision to create a leap second at the end of 2016 is timely, in oh so many ways. It especially delights us, because this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will include the premier of a new mini-opera, called “The Last Second” — about a plot to secretly add an extra leap second to the world’s clocks. A […]
AcapellaScience produced this video music performance, “Entropic Time”, which bears the accurate description “backwards Billy Joel parody”: Thanks to @drawnonglass for bringing this to our attention, in harmonious recognition that the theme of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be TIME.)