Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 268

The M-through-Z of Social Dilemmas (podcast 65)

Social situations sprout all kinds of awkwardness. You can classify some of those awkwardnesses under the letters M through Z, as we do in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.

This week, Marc Abrahams  — with dramatic readings by Robin Abrahams tells about:

Emily Post and her etiquette — Etiquette , by Emily Post, 1922. 


Social dilemmas from the not-so-distant past , (podcast #52)
The A-Through-L of Social Dilemmas ,(podcast #57)

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

The M-through-Z of Social Dilemmas (podcast 65)

Social situations sprout all kinds of awkwardness. You can classify some of those awkwardnesses under the letters M through Z, as we do in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.

This week, Marc Abrahams  — with dramatic readings by Robin Abrahams tells about:

Emily Post and her etiquette — Etiquette , by Emily Post, 1922. 


Social dilemmas from the not-so-distant past , (podcast #52)
The A-Through-L of Social Dilemmas ,(podcast #57)

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

Norwegian live-reading of immensely long consumer terms-and-conditions

The Norwegian Consumer Rights Council is doing a live reading of popular end-user license agreements for apps and services. As we post this blog item about it, the readers are approaching the fifteen (15) hour mark in their long journey through time. Click on the image below to go to their site and endure the spectacle:

(Thanks to Carl-Henrik Hörnkvist for bringing this to our attention — and especially for using his telephone to do so.)

The Parachuting Rag-Doll Experiment

Falling from a great height with a parachute is likely to result in lesser injury than falling from a great height without a parachute, suggests a newly published German medical study. The study is:

“Does usage of a parachute in contrast to free fall prevent major trauma?: a prospective randomised-controlled trial in rag dolls,” Patrick Czorlich, Till Burkhardt, Jan Hendrik Buhk, Jakob Matschke, Marc Dreimann, Nils Ole Schmidt, Sven Oliver Eicker, European Spine Journal, vol. 25, no. 5, May 2016, pp 1349-1354. (Thanks to Gylfi Ólafsson for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany, report:

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first prospective, randomised, and controlled trial that clearly demonstrates that using a parachute prevents major trauma.”

The report’s figure 2, reproduced here, comes with this explanation:

“Frontal volume rendered view giving an overview on the following main findings. R right, L left. a Uninjured rag doll in the parachute group, hash symbol zipper of the peritoneal back, asterisk node of the balloons representing the lungs (dashed line). b (1) brain injury (left cranial balloon ruptured), (2) spine and pelvic injury (LEGO bricks dislocated), (3) severe abdominal and thoracic organ injuries (only 2 of 5 balloons left intact). Please note that the testicular protection unfortunately did not fit the apparently male doll.”

A backwards harmonic parody in time

AcapellaScience produced this video music performance, “Entropic Time”, which bears the accurate description “backwards Billy Joel parody”:

Thanks to @drawnonglass for bringing this to our attention, in harmonious recognition that the theme of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be TIME.)

A round-up of American hole-in-one jurisprudence

Of all the curious things one can get insurance cover for – the golfing fraternity’s ‘hole-in-one-insurance’ is surely one of the curiouser. Why would one want insurance against a hole-in-one? The answer lies in the substantial cash bonus prizes which (some) golf clubs offer to those players who manage to get one. From the club’s point of view, it can be costly, and that’s something that they want to insure against. Details are provided in a 2004 paper for the Journal of Sports Law & Contemporary Problems (10/01/2004) entitled : A GOOD PIECE OF PAPER SPOILED:1 AN EIGHTEEN-HOLE ROUND-UP OF AMERICAN HOLE-IN-ONE JURISPRUDENCE by Parker B. Potter Jr.. The author puts the odds of holes-in-one [or should that be hole-in-ones?] at 1:40,000, and goes into substantial detail regarding the perplexing legal aspects. Citing, as an example, a legal case from 1992.

“Crawford Chevrolet, Inc. (hereinafter ‘Crawford’) had ‘agreed to provide a new vehicle to any participant who scored a hole-in-one on a certain hole during the tournament.’ The specified hole was number nine. After Don Zamora ‘scored a hole-in-one on physical hole #9, but on his second time around the course,’ he claimed the prize, which Crawford delivered. Crawford, in turn, made a claim on its hole-in-one insurance carrier, the now-familiar National Hole-in-One Association (‘Hole-in-One’), the potential victim on hole number five and the defendant on hole number six.”

The author also offers advice for insurers :

“When advising clients who offer hole-in-one insurance, tell them to write policies that contemplate every conceivable possibility, or get ready to write a check. In a world where the term ‘shots’ can be considered ambiguous, as in Crawford Chevrolet, Inc. v. National Hole-in-One Ass’n, only the most precise and detailed policy language will protect an insurer from paying when a golfer has scored a hole-in-one in a covered event.”

If you’d like to take out hole-in-one insurance, there are a number of firms worldwide who will cover you – e.g. United States, Australia, United Kingdom.

Note 1: The paper’s title pays tribute to Mark Twain, who some say is said to have said : “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

Also see (Insurance related) Calculations: Insurance for clowns

Also see (golf related) 2012 Yearly Golfball Patents: A look back

Breaking(ish) News: ‘Golf is no longer a crime, decrees China’s Communist party’ The Guardian, (14th April)

Relationship Discerned: Air Travel, Childbirth, Retirement

Here is one of the few studies to probe the relationship between air travel, childbirth, and retirement:

“The relationship between air travel behaviour and the key life stages of having children and entering retirement,” Lisa Davison, Tim Ryley [pictured here], Journal of Transport Geography, Volume 26, January 2013, Pages 78-86. The authors are at the University of Ulster and Loughborough University, UK.

(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)

A sunny look at the Cloud Appreciation Society and its founder

Jon Mooallem, writing in the New York Times, appreciates the Cloud Appreciation Society and its founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney. (Gavin was one of the stars of the Ig Nobel show this past March at Brunel University, part of the Ig Nobel EuroTour.) Here’s a little chunk of that profile:

Who were they all? Why were they there? They were a collection of ordinary people with an interest in clouds. Behind all those user names on the Cloud Society website were schoolteachers, sky divers, meteorologists, retired astronomy teachers, office workers and artists. Many people had come alone, but conversations sparked easily. (“I’ve just seen the best cloud dress I’ve seen in my life,” a woman said on the stairway. A second woman turned and said, “Well, yours is quite lovely, too.”) The atmosphere was comfortable and convivial and amplified by a kind of feedback loop of escalating relief, whereby people who arrived at a cloud conference not knowing what to expect recognized how normal and friendly everyone was and enjoyed themselves even more.

The program Pretor-Pinney had pulled together was a little highbrow but fun….

(Thanks to Gus Rancatore for bringing this to our attention.)

Here’s a TED Talk by Gavin Pretor-Pinney:

Here is a song favored, frequently, by many members of the Cloud Appreciation Society, composed and performed about a half century ago, in seeming anticipation of the creation of the Cloud Appreciation Society, by Joni Mitchell:

BONUS: Here’s video from a Cloud Appreciation Society event held, a while back, in Erbil City, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan:

Finding yet another snake with Pablo

Here’s another episode in the dramatic, true series “Finding Snakes with Pablo” (a subset of the series “The Brain Scoop“, from the Field Museum in Chicago). This episode: Fer-de-lance:

The further future adventures of Troy Hurtubise and a grizzly bear

Troy Hurtubise, who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 1998 in the field of safety engineering — for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears — is again hard at work pursuing a better way to pursue a better meeting with a grizzly bear.

The Hamilton Spectator reports:

Troy Hurtubise wants Project Grizzly to roar one more time with better armour and a new movie

Quixotic inventor Troy Hurtubise is rebooting his Project Grizzly, a curious crusade to build a RoboCop-looking protective suit to stand up to an angry bear.

The 52-year-old former Hamiltonian wants to take one more try at his lifetime goal, to go mano a grizzo in self-designed armour, and live to talk about it. He’s been working away in his North Bay workshop on an eighth version of a suit and he is also in discussions with a filmmaker to produce a sequel to the 1996 National Film Board cult classic “Project Grizzly.” …

Troy is crowdfunding this project, seeking $700,000. This promotional video explains:

And as Troy follows his calling, you can follow Troy’s tweeting, on Twitter.

LITERARY BONUS: In this video, Troy reads from his new book, Shards of Time:

TACTICAL BONUS: Here’s video of Troy with one of his recent inventions, which he calls the “Apache Long Arm”, which he optimizes for SWAT teams:

ELECTROMAGNETICAL BONUS: Here’s video of Troy and another of his recent inventions, which he calls the “EMR pod”: