“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 […]
Tag: wedding
(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 […]
The Tradition of Shoe-Throwing at Weddings
Shoe-throwing may now be mostly a political act. But not long ago, it was a common rite of marriage, writes James Crombie of Aberdeen, who has gathered some matrimonial footwear-hurling facts into a 24-page treatise called Shoe-Throwing at Weddings. This was in 1895, when readers may have empathised with Crombie’s opening thought: “Pelting a bride […]
Anthropology exercise: British wedding ritual
This video was pointed out to us by a British person as possibly being in some sense typical of modern British wedding rituals. It documents a recent wedding held on the Isle of Bute. This week’s Anthropology Exercise of the Week is to write a limerick (in traditional Limerick form) explaining some key ritual element that […]
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 […]
Nerd love, crates and barrels
Improbable Research researcher Jessica Girard and her fiance — both biologists — are long shots (because they are scientists) in the Crate & Barrel company’s Ultimate Wedding Contest. Stuff the ballot box for them (and on behalf of scientist love), if you like:
A skeptical (not cynical!) marriage
Two members of the extended Improbable Research gang have just gotten married under officially amazing and skeptical — and completely not cynical — circumstances: at The Amazing Meeting, in Las Vegas. Our congratulations and fond good wishes go to Sid Rodrigues and Rebecca Watson. Here’s video: (Thanks to Phil Plait for bringing this to everyone’s […]