Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 39

Some Physics of an Often-Falling Coyote

Much can be learned from a calculating study of cartoon animals behaving in ways that are natural to them. Here is a new example:

“Tauberian identities and the connection to Wile E. Coyote physics,” Roberto Camassa and Richard M. McLaughlin, arXiv:2304.06127, 2023. (Thank to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of North Carolina, explain:

“The application of the motion of a vertically suspended mass-spring system released under tension is studied focusing upon the delay timescale for the bottom mass as a function of the spring constants and masses. This ‘hang-time’, reminiscent of the Coyote and Road Runner cartoons, is quantified using the far-field asymptotic expansion of the bottom mass’ Laplace transform. These asymptotics are connected to the short time mass dynamics through Tauberian identities and explicit residue calculations. It is shown, perhaps paradoxically, that this delay timescale is maximized in the large mass limit of the top ‘boulder’. Experiments are presented and compared with the theoretical predictions. This system is an exciting example for the teaching of mass-spring dynamics in classes on Ordinary Differential Equations, and does not require any normal mode calculations for these predictions.”

Below: a compilation of Wile E.Coyote behavior documented on video:

Dickens Electrified / Catatonia From Catalonia / Unmasked Cochrane Report

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

Helluva Twist — CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being “interrogated” (that’s the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller and a stalwart of the Dickens Society, says he has identified a supply of electricity that flows, in a literary way, through the people in Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. Parrott announced his discovery in the March issue of the Society’s Dickens Quarterly, with a jolting 27 pages of facts – and perhaps some conjectures – all wired together with the title “Electrical undercurrents in David Copperfield”….Catatonia from Catalonia — Inspiration about medical knowledge can come from almost anywhere. Musical inspiration about the aetiology of pneumonia comes, for some people, from the song I’ll Never Fall in Love Again by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Some people call it “the pneumonia song”. David died in 2012, Bacharach in February this year, neither from pneumonia: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? / You get enough germs to catch pneumonia….Unmasked Advice — Imagine a restaurant host saying: “Welcome, diners! Tonight’s 78-course roast beef dinner includes generous portions of rotten meat, cardboard and solids that we are unable to identify. We are commendable for including (rather than excluding!) these ingredients and for telling you that we include them. We did a vast amount of careful work.” As you digest that, consider the Cochrane Report that led to misleading public outcries, such as this one in The New York Times: “the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust”. …

How much of a person is water?

“Total body water was determined by deuterium oxide dilution in 17 normal male subjects with a range of 55.9% to 70.2% and an average value of 61.8% of body weight. Eleven normal females ranged from 45.6% to 59.9% with an average of 51.9%, or 9.9% less than the males. These total body water figures have a precision of ± 800 cc. or ± 2% of total body water in a normal adult.”

That’s a quote from the study “The Measurement of Total Body Water in the Human Subject by Deuterium Oxide Dilution: With a Consideration of the Dynamics of Deuterium Distribution” (by Paul R. Schloerb, Bent J. Friis-Hansen, Isidore S. Edelman, A.K. Solomon, and Francis D. Moore, published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol. 29, no. 10, 1950, pp. 1296-1310), perused in the article “Water in Bodies” in the special WATER issue (vol. 29, no. 2) of the magazine.

The On-the-Roads Bigness of 1993 Visionary Technology

“Cool? Or Just Clunky? The Fight Over Dashboard Touch Screens,” says a headline today in the New York Times.
Without mentioning it, the Times report tells of the aftermath of technology that was honored thirty years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. The Times explains:

do-it-all touch screens, the nerve centers of many new cars, have sparked a backlash because of their size, as well as the clunky interfaces that may take eyes off the road…. For those leery of astral projections blocking their view of I-95, Mr. Langer said that drivers could choose any display level. A “mixed reality slider” can limit traditional information, such as a speedometer, to a thin strip of lower windshield, where today’s head-up displays s already operate. Drivers more at ease with digital projections can fill more of the windshield glass with content….

Schiffman’s Ig Nobel Prize

The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for Visionary Technology was awarded jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so.

Schiffman’s work is documented in US patent #5061996A. (The technical drawing you see, above, is from that patent.)

Emperor’s Missing Heart, Vibrant Gut, More Trivial Superpowers, Greenfieldwashing

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

Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly clear who could lay legal claim to it. It isn’t even clear whether the heart still exists.But maybe it does. And if Emperor Otto’s ticker is findable, the folks at the Monastery and Imperial Palace Museum of Memleben, Germany, want you to help them get their hands on it….Vibrant gut — A headline at the website Everyday Health brings vibrant hope for people who feel stuck. It reads: “New drug-free vibrating pill can bring relief for chronic constipation”. Lieven Scheire kindly brought this development to Feedback’s attention. Below the headline come these details…A new harvest of trivial superpowers — Some trivially superior people answered Feedback’s call to help us catalogue trivial superpowers (25 March). A trivial superpower is a person’s ability to reliably do some particular task – a task that seems mundane to them, but that most people find impossible to do except once in a while by sheer luck. Here are three super reports. Paul Clapham says: “I can solve anagrams in cryptic crosswords using subconscious thought. I first noticed this several years ago. A clue suggested the answer was an English author and that it was an anagram of a certain fourteen letters… And then a voice in the back of my head said ‘Rudyard Kipling’. And so it was. I notice that ability regularly now, so I don’t bother to work so hard on anagrams so much.” …Greenfieldwashing — The trivially superpowerful Kirsty Greenfield also says, about an unrelated data-gathering enterprise: “I wonder whether any of your other readers have experienced a rather selfish appropriation of nominative determinism of which I believe I have an example? My sister and I, having been born with a shared and unremarkable maiden name, but a deep love of the countryside, both went so far as to marry men with environmentally pleasing surnames….

The Snappy Book Talk

The influence of the Ig Nobel Prize slowly seeps into academia — especially in techniques for piquing people’s curiosity and attention. Here’s a new, 2023 example. The Harvard Gazette, in a report headlined “The snappy book talk: ‘When does that happen in academia?’ ” tells of an innovative event: “Scholars had seven minutes to explain their work to an audience. Some actually managed it.”

Conciseness Techniques in Ig Nobel Events

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, founded in 1991, held annually (except during pandemic years, when it happens only online) in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, has always included this or other varieties of happily constrained, happy performance by great scholars.

The Ig Nobel Prize winners give their acceptance speeches knowing that a no-nonsense eight-year-old child is on hand to tell them: “Please stop. I’m bored! Please stop. I’m bored!”

The 24/7 lectures (sometimes called the “Nano Lectures”), also part of the ceremony, give some of the world’s great thinkers the challenge and opportunity to explain their work twice — first in 24 seconds, then in seven words. (In earlier years, the Heisenberg Certainty Lectures presented speakers with the challenge of finishing their talk within 30 seconds, with the risk of being whistled off-stage if they exceeded the time limit.)

Ig Nobel events held elsewhere over the past few decades, in many countries, have been testing grounds for these and other methods to help speakers keep their speeches so short (10 minutes, or 5 minutes, or 3 minutes, or 30 seconds) and so lively that audiences enjoy the talks, and leave filled with curiosity about the topics and the speakers.

Detail About the Harvard Innovation

Here’s more detail from the Gazette‘s report of how these techniques being adopted in one part of the groves of academe:

Gathering Monday at the Center for Government and International Studies, a group of professors looked excited to talk about their books, if maybe a little wary of the clock.

Sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the “book blitz” demanded that each author or editor describe his or her work in seven minutes or less. When time was up, a bell signaled that it was time to stop talking. The event was a chance for associates of the center to promote their work in an informal setting, and a hit with both the audience and the eight speakers, even if only two managed to beat the bell.

“I enjoyed the format quite a bit and the snappiness of the presentations,” Dustin Tingley, a professor of government, said with a chuckle. “When does that happen in academia?” …

For the Business School’s Jeremy Friedman, who finished his discussion of “Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World” with 20 seconds to spare, the event was challenging but fun. He had practiced his seven-minute speech a couple of times, he admitted. But even more powerful was his geographical advantage.

“I talk really fast,” Friedman said. “I’m from New York.”

(Thanks to Stephanie Clayman for bringing the Gazette report to our attention.)

Rhizomic Digitized Surveillance Contradictions Mystery

For pure intellectual and verbal verve and daring, few fields of research rival that of Accounting Auditing Control. An audaciously provocative new example appears in the journal Accounting Auditing Control:

“Rhizomic Digitized Surveillance, Contradictions, and Managerial Control Practice: Insights from the Société Générale Scandal,” by Aziza Laguecir and Bernard Leca (published in vol. 29, no. 1, 2023, pp. 7-38).

From the first word of the title (“rhizomic”) to the final sentence of the text (an 86-word single-sentence quotation from the plain-spoken philosopher Michel Foucault) it identifies, amplifies, and gives glory to mysteries that otherwise might have remained obscure.

It’s all about ambiguity-filled contradictions, explain the authors: “We question whether these contradictions are unintentional or deliberately designed to reduce control efficiency in digitized contexts and preserve certain operational practices.”

Hypergunk, Nasal Warfare, and Musical-Taste Calcification

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

Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism”. The matter isn’t as simple as some people assume. Nor are some of its concepts, though they have colourful names. “Gunky objects”, for instance….Nasal warfare – There is a war going on in your face. To be bluntly specific about it: there is bacterial warfare in the nasal cavity. Britney Hardy and D. Scott Merrell at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Maryland, write about it in the Journal of Bacteriology. They sketch the micro-military history of the clash….Pop science – “Where do our music preferences come from?” ask Alexandra Lamont at Keele University and Jessica Crich at the University of Sheffield, both in the UK. Mostly, they find, from our families: one way (directly) and another (our family’s reaction to our telling them about whatever new music we encounter). But Lamont and Crich mostly avoid a related question: when do our music preferences stop growing and become calcified? Upon reaching adulthood, many people stop paying much attention to new popular music and performers. Successive generations of middle-aged people showed uninterest in the music of new kids on the block Elvis Presley, Taylor Swift, Lil Baby and others….

The special WATER issue of the magazine (Improbable Research)

The special WATER issue (vol. 29, no. 2) of the magazine is now out and about. The table of contents and several of the articles are online.

As you might guess, it’s full of improbable research about water.

Ambiguous-Title Warning: Not for Cannibals

A careful choice of words can perhaps prevent a tragedy. Here’s an example. A minority of human cannibals might become overexcited when they see the title of this study:

“Trends in Dietary Quality Among Adults in the United States, 1999 Through 2010,” Dong D. Wang, Cindy W. Leung, Yanping Li, Eric L. Ding, Stephanie E. Chiuve, Frank B. Hu, and Walter C. Willett, JAMA Internal Medicine, 174, no. 10, 2014, pp. 1587-1595.