Mate Abundance and Engagement Ring Size and Cost Expectations [study]

“One growing area of research involves the study of engagement ring preferences, as a putative cue to male commitment to, and willingness to share resources with, the female recipient.” – explain Ashley Locke, Jessica Desrochers, Danielle Lynch and Steven Arnocky of Nipissing University, Canada, in a 2019 publication of the Human Evolution Laboratory. “We examined […]

(Belated) Wedding congratulations to a Spam-Managerial Ig Nobel Prize winner

We have only just now seen news of the 2017 wedding of the manager of the Spam Museum. We offer our heartiest, most tasteful congratulations. Why this matters to us: The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition was awarded to the utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion. The wedding announcement, in […]

Plain-words challenge: Wedding Words

Today’s challenge is to translate a paragraph into clear language that anyone can understand. This paragraph appears in the study “Consumption as common sense: Heteronormative hegemony and white wedding desire,” by Patricia Arend [pictured here], published in the journal Journal of Consumer Culture [vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 144-163]: “[This] article examines the white wedding desires […]

Leaning to the left: New Ig Nobel winners wed each other

Rolf Zwaan and Anita Eerland could not travel to Harvard to collect their 2012 Ig Nobel Psychology prize for their study “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller“. They had an earlier appointment they did not want to cancel: getting married— to each other. Right after their wedding ceremony in the Netherlands […]

How gold wedding rings go missing abrasively

A gold wedding band symbolises permanence, but bits of it disappear as a marriage endures, scraping against the marital skin every moment that metal and finger convene. Georg Steinhauser, a chemist at Vienna University of Technology, calculated how much goes missing, how quickly and at what cost. Steinhauser’s study, Quantification of the Abrasive Wear of a Gold Wedding […]

Finding an optimal seating chart for a wedding

Finding an optimal seating chart by Meghan L. Bellows (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University) and J.D. Luc Peterson (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University) EDITOR’S NOTE: The authors submitted this article long prior to the wedding. Somehow we managed to not see it until long after. The only benefit being that the […]