People-calculating: open doors and closed doors

Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum [pictured here] of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception […]

Congratulations to New York’s most efficiently irritable man

Tomorrow Professor John Trinkaus — New York City’s most efficiently irritable man — will give his last lecture at the Zicklin School of Business, where he has taught for fifty years. Professor Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for literature, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him (such […]

Musings on Trinkaus et Ig

The Simbla blog recently wrote an appreciation of Ig Nobel Prize winner John Trinkaus [pictured here receiving his prize at the ceremony]: When I was doing my post on the Ig Nobel prizes I came across the story of John Trinkaus. As someone who frequently ponders things out loud and then gets told he thinks too […]

Improbable Research