Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 37

“Shigeru Watanabe Proves Art Is for the Birds”

Nippon.com profiles Ig Nobel Prize winner Shigeru Watanabe. It begins:

Japan’s Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Monet or Picasso? Japanese Researcher Watanabe Shigeru Proves Art Is for the Birds

Keiō University Professor Emeritus Watanabe Shigeru and colleagues won the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology in 1995 for showing that birds can distinguish between different styles of paintings. With more than a half century of experience under his belt, Watanabe continues to explore the secrets of animal behavior.

Developing an eye for art, it turns out, is not exclusive to humans. Watanabe Shigeru and colleagues at Keiō University, where he is a professor of psychology, trained pigeons to distinguish different paintings, including those by the masters Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. What is the significance of this? For those studying comparative cognition, it showed that birds make sense of their world in ways not unlike humans.

The team earned the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology in 1995 for their efforts. The prize, launched in 1991 by Annals of Improbable Research editor Mark Abrahams, celebrates the quirkier side of scientific discovery. The research of Watanabe and others, though, is no joke.

Watanabe admits he took little heed of the Ig Nobel at first, viewing it as students at Harvard University “having a bit of fun.” He has since changed his tune and even attended a 2018 event in Tokyo highlighting the prize, which he described as “a fascinating exhibition of unique research.”

Watanabe stands out among Japan’s numerous Ig Nobel winners—28 and counting—as much for his unusual research topics as his exalted career (in 2020 he won the prestigious Japanese ornithological prize the Yamashina Yoshimaro Award for his decades of research into avian behavior)….

A Jerk and a Creep / Lighting Up / Live Long? / Unfunneled Superpower

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

A jerk and a creep — “Hidden jerk in universal creep and aftershocks” may sound like the name of a Hollywood movie – and maybe some day it will be. But for now, it is exclusively the title chosen by Vikash Pandey at Krea University in India for a mathematical physics write-up that involves earthquakes, avalanches, landslides and bamboo chopsticks. And, indirectly, spaghetti. It was published in Physical Review E. Allan Harvey brought it to Feedback’s attention. Jerk, as most calculus students are amused to learn, is the technical word for the rate at which acceleration changes….Lighting up — … The researchers behind the study, perhaps realising that people outside their fields might feel intimidated, provide a quietly charming graphical abstract (below). The artistically overwhelming power of the whole thing derives from the striking proximity – and similarity in size and colour – of the rat’s eye and the glowing tip of the cigarette. The rat’s head and the cigarette each float in space, compelling the reader’s attention.

How long you will live — … They take from this a cheerily dour assessment: “We find that none of these algorithms are able to explain more than 1.5% of the variation in age of death. Our results point towards the unpredictability of mortality and underscore the challenges of using algorithms to predict major life outcomes.” Do remind yourself that a few seconds ago, when you began to read this item, you were making the prediction that you would live long enough to read the item all the way through to its end.Unfunnelled powers — Clive Teale confides having a trivial superpower that is rarely mentioned in polite or other company, maybe because it is rare. His confession adds to Feedback’s growing list of such superpowers….

Prozac and the Happiness of Clams (Limerickally)

1998 Ig Nobel Biology Prize — The prize was awarded to Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac. The research is documented in the study “Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs),” Peter F. Fong, Peter T. Huminski, and Lynette M. D’urso, Journal of Experimental Zoology, vol. 280, 1998, pp. 260-264. Here’s a limerick about it:

There’s a simile, pithy and snappy.

It’s wrong. Sometimes bivalves feel crappy.

But help’s on the way.

Give it Prozac today

To make a clam really feel happy.

That’s an excerpt from the Ig Nobel Limericks column in the special WATER issue (vol. 29, no. 2) of the magazine. The limericks are created by our limerick laureate, Martin Eiger.

Dead Duck Day is approaching, again

Kees Moeliker reports:

Monday June 5th, 2023 is Dead Duck Day again. At exactly 17:55 h (CET) we will honor the mallard duck that collided with the glass facade of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer (me) the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize.

Dead Duck Day also commemorates the billions of other birds that die(d) from colliding with glass buildings, and challenges people to find solutions to this global problem.

After a pandemic break, Dead Duck Day is open to the public again. Please join the free, short open-air ceremony next to the new wing of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam (the Netherlands), right below the Dead Duck Memorial Plaque— the very spot where that duck (now museum specimen NMR 9989-00232) met his dramatic end.

Those who wear an original Dead Duck Day T-shirt have a chance to win a signed copy of the book ‘De eendenman’.

A six-course duck dinner, after the ceremony, at the famous Tai Wu restaurant is also open to the public (at your own expense).

During the first years of the covid pandemic, Dead Duck Day had no audience. That will change, this year, 2023.Time & location

Monday, June 5, 2023, at 5:55 p.m. sharp, in the Museumpark next to the glass new building of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, Westzeedijk 345. Arrival at the restaurant at approximately 6:45 p.m.

History of the Dead Duck

Read Kees Moeliker’s brief writeup explaining Dead Duck Day. And/or, watch his TED talk about it:

Tea sugar, Packaging philosophy, Leftist food (Bento), Superpower

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

A spoonful of sugar? — Should one take sugar in one’s tea? Feedback is mindful of two things about this question. For one, nearly everyone, in the UK especially, considers (or pretends to consider) the question to be of life-and-death importance; and secondly, they consider (or pretend to consider) one answer to be clearly correct. The Annals of Internal Medicine has published a 280-word item that – let’s be blunt about this – throws a spanner in the teacup. A necessary and welcome spanner….Packaging philosophy — Mark Dionne tells Feedback of his surprise on learning that you can become a Doctor of Philosophy in packaging. It is Michigan State University’s school of packaging that confers the necessary degree. “We all have questions about packaging,” reads its website, “such as, what is packaging and why is it important to society?” That statement is a little vague as to who, exactly, the “we” is. One question we (whoever we are) might ask about packaging is…Leftist food — The preference of Canadians as to which side of a bento (a traditional Japanese lunch comprising rice and vegetables with meat or fish, usually served in a lacquered box) should have the largest, most calorie-heavy component of the meal hadn’t been determined – not with investigative rigour – until now. Lisa Poon and Lorin Elias at the University of Saskatchewan presented 483 Canadians with a photo of a bento box and another of its mirror image. They published a report about it, called “What’s in the box? Preference for leftward plating of food in bentos“, in the journal Food Quality and Preference. Citing earlier research by others, Poon and Elias say…Ex-superpowers — Rex Waygood adds two entries to Feedback’s growing catalogue of trivial superpowers, along with a sad warning that some trivial superpowers can be temporary….

A maybe-haphazard one-from-each-year sampling of Ig Nobel Prize winners

A few of the photos are not the right people, but otherwise this video by TopData shows a fun selection of one winner from each year of the 32 years (so far) of the Ig Nobel Prizes. (Ten prizes are awarded each year).

Keywords to Understanding Misunderstanding

Zeno Vendler chose, perhaps understandably, chose to write an article about understanding something. That article is: “Understanding Misunderstanding,” Zeno Vendler, Language, Mind, and Art, 1994, pp. 9-21.

The publisher’s web site says, about it:

Keywords: Black Hole, Moral Virtue, Wishful Thinking, Plain View, Indirect Question

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Uber-Prolific Publishing, Hanging, Standing, Punching

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

Publish but be damned — … The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 studies at a rate of one every 37 hours”…. Impressive as that is, Luque still has a way to go if he’s going to catch and exceed Russian chemist Yuri Struchkov. Struchkov was awarded the 1992 Ig Nobel Literature Prize “for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days”….Handy for hanging — 1. Animals with hands and arms that make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch are likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. 2. Humans have hands and arms that don’t make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch. That is why humans aren’t very likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine….Handy for standing — 1. Older people swing their arms more than young people, as part of keeping their balance rather than frequently toppling over. 2. If everyone is forced to stand while keeping their hands clasped in front of their body, young people are less prone to toppling than older people. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at Coventry University and Imperial College London in the UK, the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia.Punching up data — While brain scientists elsewhere study the accumulated effects of a lifetime of whacks to the head, a quartet have been watching how people respond to the sight of a fist fast approaching their face. An account of their action-adventure experiment jabs out from the midsection of the journal Human Movement Science….

The Adventure of Winston Churchill’s Hernia

“Winston Churchill: Inguinal Hernia Repair on 11 June 1947,” by J. Allister Vale and John W. Scadding,” is one of the research studies featured in the article “Medical Research: Sarsaparilla, Nose, Churchill’s Hernia“, 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.

Sex in Space (Victorianly), and Listed Cranks, and High-Tech Coffee-Sniffing

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

The Kármán sutra — … The paper is almost Victorian in its voluminous discussion of possible regulatory mechanisms, but nearly complete avoidance of mentioning fornication. The highest moment of titillation comes in the following passage: “The adult film industry has previously explored the possibility of video/film production in space environments. In 2000 a parabolic aircraft flight was used for filming a weightless scene…”Love thy crank — Many scientists enjoy an unsteady supply of letters sent to them by eccentrics. Many scientists don’t enjoy it. People at the RationalWiki have been gathering and tending a list of what they regard as “cranks”. From a neuroscience action-potential perspective, and perhaps from other perspectives, too, here are some of the standout items….To be sniffed at — The desire to “wake up and smell the coffee” drives many people. In the science community, that drive is notoriously and proudly strong. A Belgian/Italian/Argentinian collaboration is souping up the available technology for smelling coffee…