This year’s 24/7 Lecturers are hard at work preparing their lectures for the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. These lectures — a complete technical description of a subject in 24 seconds, followed by a clear summary in seven words — demand more skill and thought than the audience may realize. Here is a […]
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 […]
“Have you tried taking a stiff drink or two?” might not be a question that a professional writer would expect from their doctor. Unless, that is, they suffered from writer’s cramp, and their doctor had come across a 2012 case report in the journal Internal Medicine – Alcohol-Responsive Writer’s Cramp – in which Sung-Chul Lim, […]
J.S. Milne (pictured here) wrote a list of “Tips for Authors.” Though intended for mathematicians, it may be equally useful to others. Milne’s list begins with this: If you write clearly, then your readers may understand your mathematics and conclude that it isn’t profound. Worse, a referee may find your errors. Here are some tips […]
Gorilla dung matters. This came to mind today, when I saw the news about a particular gorilla: “Famous Dian Fossey Gorilla Presumed Dead at 38“. In ninth grade biology class, I wrote a report about a book about gorillas and about Dian Fossey and other scientists who studied those gorillas. Being a ninth grader, I was impressed at how dung had played […]
“Despite the vast amount written on the chin, it is deserving of continued attention, for perhaps understanding the chin will reveal some unexpected insight into what it means to be human.” – explain Dr James D. Pampush (Duke University, US) and Dr David J. Daegling ( University of Florida, US). They add to the literature […]
Are you a legal-writing professor? Unsure about the use of Emoji(s) for comments on academic work? Jennifer Murphy Romig who is an Instructor in Legal Writing, of the Research and Advocacy Program at Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, US, has produced a guide to ‘Commenting by Emoji: A Tentative Glossary for Legal Writing Professors’. […]
Adam J. Calhoun has written a wonderful blog entry that illustrates, with some great data visualization, that it is possible to algorithmically distinguish different novelists based only on their punctuation habits. The idea is simple: just remove all words from a corpus of text and look at the patterns of the punctuation. Here is an illustration. […]
If you’re not a professional typographic practitioner, you might fall into the trap of thinking that certain upper-case letters (such as H, I, N and O) will look exactly the same upside down (i.e. when rotated 180 degrees about their z* axis). But subtle complications can, and do arise when there are serifs involved. One […]
Professor Stephanie Carvin remarks (on Twitter): “Can’t imagine why more people don’t study Public Poli…..Zzzzzzzz“. Professor Carvin said this upon reading the abstract to the study “Understanding and influencing the policy process,” by Christopher M. Weible , Tanya Heikkila, Peter deLeon, and Paul A. Sabatier, published in the March 2012 issue (volume 45, number 1) of the journal […]