Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 35

A grand Japanese gathering of Ig Nobel winners and plans

A few years ago, the TV network NHK again gathered together several Japanese Ig Nobel Prize winners, for a look back at some of their favorite prizes, and a look ahead at some of their hopes and research dreams:

Flowery polymorphic perversion / Screwing up / Plant on meat

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

Flowery polymorphic perversion—… Grażyna Gajewska at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland is one of the few academics who is now overtly studying polymorphic perversion on a broad, societal level. Her recent treatise “Polymorphic perversion of human and other-than-human bodies” appears in the journal PorÓwnania….Screwing up — ….Successful detection of a loose bolt leads, of course, to another go at step two, bolt tightening. And so it goes, with much repetition, robotic life on the assembly line being a long succession of mechanical screwings, screw-ups, recoveries and let’s-get-on-with-its. That is the quotidian, nuts-and-bolts reality of auto-auto-making machinery.Midnight musings — …A person named Michael Plant, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, wrote a paper called “The meat eater problem“….

Icky Cutesy Research: Gills Want Fun, Collection Oil

“An Investigation of Variables in a Fecal Flotation Technique“, by M.R. O’Grady and J.O.D. Slocombe, is one of the research studies featured in the article “Icky Cutesy Research: Gills Want Fun, Collection Oil“, in the special Formulas & Recipes issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research).

Read the article online. And if you like, subscribe to the magazine, and maybe even snag yourself some back issues.

Cutting remarks: The power of few words

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 conversation between me and one of this year’s 24/7 lecturers:

Me: “How is the draft of your 24/7 lecture coming along?”

24/7 Lecturer: “It’s harder than it looks. Getting there. Cutting. Ruthlessly.”

Me: “Stiletto, battle axe, chainsaw…”

Coleopterists review of the surprising bark beetles book

In the new issue of The Coleopterists Bulletin (vol. 77, no. 2, 2023), Sarah M. Smith reviewed the book The Surprising Lives of Bark Beetles, by Jiri Hulcr and Marc Abrahams. Here’s part of Smith’s review:

The authors’ love of bark beetles is clear and infectious and the reader will likely come away smitten with these tiny beetles….

I have studied scolytines since 2006 and over my 16 years of study have spent many hours in conversation with friends and family about bark and ambrosia beetles. Sharing this book will allow them to fully appreciate and understand what makes these tiny little specks of dust that I study so enthralling. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in beetles, natural history and of course, bark beetles. I only wish that the pages of the book were larger to better display the grandeur of the beetles.

1st-ever Improbable Dramatic Readings event in Poland

On Saturday, July 1, 2023 the first-ever Improbable Dramatic Readings event in Poland will happen, as part of  Bazyliszek, in Warsaw. Mikołaj Kowalewski will compere.

BACKGROUND: What Is/Are Improbable Dramatic Readings?

Here’s what happens at this kind of event.

Luminaries (of various wattage) each do brief dramatic readings from seemingly absurd, genuine research studies and patents. Some of those studies and patents have won Ig Nobel Prizes. All of them make people laugh, then think.

The dramatic readers also take questions from the audience — despite and because they have no previous knowledge of the studies they will be reading. The compere attempts to keep some small degree of structure.

Improbable Research invented this kind of event some years ago. It’s happened many times in the USA and a smaller number of times in the UK. Occasionally, we have done an Improbable Research After Dark event, with readings of especially intriguing flavor.

As mentioned above, this July 1 event will be the first ever in Poland.

Down and up in a cat, dried plasma, animalistic us, snot useful

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

A sick experiment —The phrase “what goes up must come down” isn’t obviously relevant to the insides of a cat. The countervailing “what goes down must come up” is, when that cat has swallowed something of dubious nutritional worth. Christiana Fischer, Nolan Chalifoux and Erica Reineke have quantified the “must” aspect of it, as they explain to anyone with the stomach to read their report…Food stuff —… The pet food industry has taken spray-dried animal plasma to its bosom. Reports indirectly show how the little-bits-of-everything substance could become tempting for chefs and food vendors. In Spain, Javier Polo and Carmen Rodríguez have written a series of studies…Just like us —Inspired by the old saying that “people are the strangest animals”, Feedback wants to compile a sturdy list of animal behaviour metaphors that also tellingly describe some of our fellow humans. This could be an enlightening project. The colourful strangenesses characteristic of certain people strongly resemble the colourful strangenesses characteristic of certain species of other, non-human animals, after all. Such a list might also be useful to professionals….Snot a superpower — Patrick Laughlin contributes to another of Feedback’s catalogue projects. Laughlin boasts a trivial superpower that can be cultivated and that can extend the joys of childhood into later life….

Stepping parts of a big organ

Roland Eberlein tells some of the history of how people tried and sometimes succeeded at supplying the wind for bigger and bigger pipe organs. His essay “Technique of the Organ, ” published by the Walcker Foundation for Organ Research, goes into detail about some of the largest improvements:

“The sound of the medieval organ must always have been a bit howling because of the fluctuations in wind pressure – that was probably part of the organ style of the time…. [In] the late Middle Ages, the bellows were made larger and no longer pressed together by hand, but loaded with a weight, since this automatically resulted in a fairly constant wind pressure. The self-weight of the calcane could be used to weigh down the bellows plate, provided the bellows were large enough. The calcant only had to stand on the bellows with one foot and pull it up and down with this foot. The Halberstadt cathedral organ from 1361, after a renovation in 1495, had a system with such bellows, which the calcaneans pulled up and pressed together with their feet. It still existed around 1600 and was described and illustrated [in the drawing you see here] by Michael Praetorius in 1619″

A Glimpse at a More Modern Example

If you have never seen an organist’s footwork (or if you have, and want to see more), take a look at this video:

Pedal Restoration, If You Will

And if you should ever obtain an old organ that needs repair work to its pedals, enjoy this video about how one person went about that kind of task:

 

Ambiguity: Broilers in Turkey

This week’s ambiguously-worded science headline: “Profitability and Cost Analysis for Contract Broiler Production in Turkey,”by Suleyman Karaman, Yavuz Taşcıoğlu, and Osman Doğan Bulut, Animals, vol. 13, no. 13, 2023.

The authors are based at Akdeniz University and Iğdır University, Turkey.

What happens if you give Froot Loops to a rat and study its penis

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

Not such a comfort — To see how a man’s stress levels and diet might alter his shape, one might give comfort food to a stressed rat and study its penis. Researchers at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil did exactly that, but with a larger number of rats (32 in total, though not all were given comfort food and only some were stressed)….Somewhat missing stuff — … A Polish journalist tells Feedback that during those four months from December to April, everyone was aware that the object was somewhere in Poland, but the government apparently made no effort to find it or acknowledge its existence. The journalist says, “It was probably a missile sent into Poland by mistake in a typical Russian army screw-up. It was unarmed.” The horseback rider’s discovery forced the government to officially stop not noticing the object’s existence….Unskilled and unaware — … One group, psychologists, sometimes tries to use mathematical tools to analyse human behaviour that can be difficult, maybe impossible, to analyse using only mathematical tools. The other group, mathematicians, also sometimes tries to use mathematical tools to analyse human behaviour that can be difficult, maybe impossible, to analyse using only mathematical tools. Each group tends to see itself as more competent than the other at analysing human behaviour….Distance learning — Having surveyed Feedback’s list of trivial superpowers, Mandi Brooker adds one that is educational. She says: “I am a high school maths teacher with absolutely no sporting/throwing/ kicking ability whatsoever, but when I find that a whiteboard marker is getting irritatingly faint, I can hurl it right across a big classroom unerringly into the bin, every time. It impresses the kids no end, which is all there is to teaching, really”.