Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 19

COMING: The 2024 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes will be awarded at the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday evening, September 12, 2024, at MIT (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After four pandemic-years in which the ceremony happened only online, this will resume the tradition of doing it with everyone together in a big room with […]

Nest persistence, Not your way, Gun theory, Smell, Says-it-all

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nest: still abandoned — Brace yourselves. That abandoned bird’s nest is still seated in the mouth of the large, ancient, carved stone human face hanging high on a wall in the northernmost corner of the outdoor garden […]

Some People Prefer Spurious Specifications

Some specific research news (note: this news is not new) about specifications: “Specification Seeking: How Product Specifications Influence Consumer Preference,” Christopher K. Hsee, Yang Yang, Yangjie Gu, and Jie Chen, Journal of Consumer Research:, vol. 35, April 2009, pp. 952-956. (Thanks to Charles Bergquist for bringing this to our attention). The authors, at the University […]

Looking for the new Miss Sweetie Poo

We are looking for a new Miss Sweetie Poo, for this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen on Thursday evening, September 12, 2024, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Miss Sweetie Poo is our time enforcer — she helps the speakers keep their speeches brief and delightful. […]

Hardened children, “Well known that”, Fascist disease, Eely gross

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Hardened children — “It is well known that the best means of preventing colds is hardening,” writes Sidikova Maryam Amankeldievna in the Journal of Medicine, Practice and Nursing. To prevent parents from going overboard, she warns that […]

The special NON-QUANTUM PHYSICS issue

The special NON-QUANTUM PHYSICS (volume 30, number 4, July/August 2024) issue of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research has just gone out to subscribers. Even if you are not a subscriber you can read several of its articles online free, for looks at some physics of Detangling, Whipping, Kicking, Walking, Telescoping and many other familiar things; and at […]

Large Variations in Sleepiness Related to Time of Day

Some scientists are awakening to the possibility that there are variations in sleepiness related to time of day. Other scientists are already awake to that possibility. All scientists are to some or other degree either likely or unlikely to read this study about the matter: “Comment on Short-term Variation in Subjective Sleepiness,” C.A. Eriksen, T. […]

Severed foot / Sea squirt, Holy ghostwriters, Tasty worms

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Legless on the shore — Extremities can bring confusion even to trained experts. Joanna Glengarry and Melanie Archer at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia warn that forensic pathologists and anthropologists “should be prepared to […]

How Hooked Are Leisure Fisherman on Leisure Fishing?

Some people who love to fish love to fish more than some other people love to fish. This study began the lengthy process of understanding who and how much.

“How Do Recreationists Make Activity Substitution Decisions? A Case of Recreational Fishing,” Stephen G. Sutton and Chi-Ok Oh, Leisure Sciences, vol. 37, no. 4, 2015, pp. 332-353. The authors, at James Cook University, Australia, and Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea, explain:

“The substitution of other activities for recreational fishing is of particular interest to those interested in fishing participation patterns because when activity substitution occurs, an individual’s participation in recreational fishing is reduced or discontinued. This article explores the relationship between commitment to fishing and willingness to substitute other activities for fishing using recreational fishers from Queensland, Australia. A model is developed and tested which posits that willingness to substitute other activities for fishing is indirectly related to level of fishing commitment….”

Air taxi / bird collisions, Moose / train collisions, Ketchup, Pathology stars

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Mid-air collision — To learn whether air taxi passengers need worry about collisions with birds, a crash programme in Germany did some tests. What with the complexity and danger of having actual air taxis have congress with actual birds, perfection was out of reach. So the experimenters made do, dropping artificial “bird projectiles” onto a metal plate rigged to measure the impact force….Mid-collision track — Speaking of birds-and-air-taxis-ish experiments, have you heard the one about the moose and the bullet train? Yong Peng and his colleagues at Central South University in China have begun to examine what might happen when these heavyweights meet at high speed, in the paper “Analysis of moose motion trajectory after bullet train-moose collisions“….Feeling saucy — Slowly, sweetly, new sauce insights pour in from readers. These pertain to the off-label usage of ketchup and other sticky foodstuffs to make electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes work well (Feedback, 25 May)….Star deaths stars — It’s surprising how few people are hailed as being a “celebrity pathologist”, isn’t it? The Associated Press brings news of the death of one of them: “Dr. Cyril Wecht, celebrity pathologist who argued more than 1 shooter killed JFK, dies at 93”. One of the first celebrity pathologists, Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947), helped establish London’s reputation as the go-to place for entertainingly clever murder mystery investigations. The Royal College of Physicians made clear, postmortemly, that Spilsbury’s career was quite theatrical….