Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 41

Chicken Chicken Chicken

Doug Zongker’s famous talk, delivered at the Improbable Research session at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in San Francisco. Video documentation by Yoram Bauman.

Coffee cosmetics / UK coffee enema gap / Abyss of lunacy / Bayesian delay

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

Caffeine boost — … Though some folk choose to roast, brew and drink coffee, innovative scientists use the bean and its byproducts to make cosmetics. Fernanda Maria Pinto Vilela and her colleagues at Brazil’s Federal University of Juiz de Fora did a worldwide search for every recent patent that applies coffee to that purpose. They found patents for producing emulsions, gels, suspensions, solutions, powders, aerosols, sticks, creams, lotions, ointments, shampoos, serum, soaps, essences, masks and sprays – all of them meant to be dripped, rubbed or otherwise applied to human skin….A royal endeavour — …Until recently, the UK led the world in exploring and promoting coffee enemas’ benefits. The public face of that effort, the now former Prince Charles, recently assumed new professional duties. Unless someone else is appointed soon to carry on the work, UK industry and the general populace might soon face a coffee enema gap.Abyss of infinite lunacy — The academic field called evolutionary psychology suffers from an image problem among scholars in general. There is a suspicion that much of the discussion there is just slick storytelling, with only skimpy evidence for the stories. Some reputations, complainers grumble, are more marketed than earned. Even many marketing professors are known to keep their distance from evolutionary psychology. But they shouldn’t, suggests Gad Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Canada….Feedback on Howls — … Berry’s own note is dedicated to another Feedback item. “I can also contribute to your mention of the 11-year publication delay [endured by ecologist Peter Shaw]. Longer is the interval between submission (1747) and publication (1763) of a paper by Thomas Bayes (he of the eponymous statistics)”, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. But “I would be surprised,” says Berry, “if this 16-year delay is the longest”.

The Lake Woebegon Effect and Counting Numbers

Mathematician Jim Propp connects the counting numbers — the concept of them, not particular, specific numbers — to the seemingly unconnected Lake Woebegon Effect. Propp’s essay appears in his Mathematical Enchantments blog:

Beneath and Beyond

… The twentieth century weekly radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” had a recurring feature called “The news from Lake Woebegone”, in which host Garrison Keillor would describe fictional happenings during the past week in his iconic, nonexistent home town of Lake Woebegone, Minnesota. Each week he’d end the news segment with the same tag-line: “And that’s the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” That last line gave humorous expression to the fact that most parents think their children are objectively special, and it even gave rise to a new bit of psychological jargon. But curiously, a version of the Lake Woebegone fallacy applies to the counting numbers, not as a fallacy but as a fact – specifically, the fact that every counting number is smaller than average….

Propp then goes on to explain, clearly, why every counting number is smaller than average.

 

Unglued Submarine Fix, 10 Cups of Coffee, Windscreen Whine, The Found Footprint

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

A sticky fix — News headlines tell a gripping, simple tale: “Royal Navy probe after claims £88m Trident submarine nuclear reactor fault was fixed with super glue” (Wales Online). “Furious Navy chiefs order investigation after ‘workers on Trident submarine glued broken bolts in a nuclear reactor chamber’” (Daily Mail)….Ten cups of coffee a day — The word “could” carries a lot of water (so to speak) that could be used to brew a lot of coffee (so to drink) in a US study called “Benefit-Risk of Coffee Consumption and All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Disability Adjusted Life Year Analysis”. The study enlivens the sometimes death-centric journal Food and Chemical Toxicology….Wipe without whining — A new study in the journal Applied Acoustics includes an intellectual treat: a short history of humanity’s attempt to grasp and solve a small, annoying problem. The specific issue: when a windscreen-wiper changes direction, it makes a noise….The Gorham footprint — Fiction overflows with police officers who use good scientific technique to solve mysteries and journalists who use clear, terse prose to inform the public. Carmen Nobel reminds Feedback that such people do exist. The Gorham Times, in Gorham, Maine, features “the blotter”, a summary of incidents as noted by local law enforcement. The 19 January edition tells an entire detective story in just 35 words….

How to Befriend Crows

Carl Bergstrom wrote a simple, clear guide, explaining how to invite crows into your daily life. It begins:

How to Befriend Crows

Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described….

If you live in an urban or suburban area where crows are around it’s not too hard to befriend them. Rural crows are harder but not impossible. First and foremost they like food. Peanuts in the shell are a favorite treat but most anything works; crows are omnivorous. It’s probably not good for them, but they adore cheetos.

The photo [you see here] is not a good shot but the only one I have of my beloved Tatterwing demonstrating next-level peanut technique: five at a time by spearing. No other crow figured this out….

 

Cannabis for construction workers, Romance research noir-noir-noir

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

Cannabis for construction workers — A Nigerian study from 2015 hints at a cannabis boost to efficiency. Manasseh Iroegbu at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, is lead author of “Exploring the performance of mason workers in the construction industry: New evidence from the use of cannabis at work site in a field experiment”….Bear-face on Mars — A smiley-faced bear, discernible in a NASA satellite’s image of the surface of Mars (above), is inspiring smiles on the faces of humans on the surface of Earth. Similar discoveries have garnered two Ig Nobel prizes….Romance research, triple-darkly — Romance can be challenging, especially when one of the romancers seems “dangerous” or “gross”, or has a personality bursting with “Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy”, three qualities known as the dark triad. The conjunction of seamy personalities and romance is much studied by psychologists, perhaps none more diligent than Peter Jonason, who has published about 200 studies on the dark triad…. A little bit missing — While astrophysicists try to identify the “missing mass” that constitutes most of the universe, authorities in Western Australia had to search for a specific, tiny chunk of mass that went missing….

A rhythmic data heap awaiting analysis

This video seems to invite analysis by anyone intrigued by the potential reaction of whoever who might be exposed to it. The video shows ten hours of repetition of the solo artist Konstrakta performing a musical piece called “In Corpore Sano”, representing Serbia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022.

 

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

Ten hours of repetition is a lot of repetition.

Historic research projects from the past offer two (of a possible zillion) paths that future researchers might take with this video: (1) the repetitive physics of “Om”; and (2) Is repeatedly playing a short piano piece for 28 hours harmful?

Here’s a brief video of that second project. The music — all 28 hours of it repetitively — is “Vexations” be Eric Satie, performed by Armin Fuchs:

BONUS: Further Fuchs

If you were fascinated by that 28-hour Fuchs piano performance, you might imbibe some later, also repetitive, piano performances by Fuchs, of other musical compositions:

Armin Fuchs, the pianist who performed for 28 hours with EEG (electroencephalogram) recordings being gathered from his head, should perhaps not be confused with Armin Fuchs, the physics professor who sometimes studied EEG data.

Carrots, Sticks, Howling, and the Persistence of Time

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

On the origin of carrots — Do you know where your carrot, if you have a carrot, comes from? A new study from the University of L’Aquila in Italy outlines one approach to finding out. “It must be noted…” the paper explains, “that the methods proposed so far for tracing the geographical origin of carrots as well as for discriminating between organic and conventionally grown carrots, are somewhat scarce.” …Stick points — A humble stick can yield up many insights. Of which here are three. “The phenomenon of the ‘howling wind’… occurs as strong winds whip around bare tree branches and electrical transmission lines,” write Lutz Kasper and Patrik Vogt in a recent issue of The Physics Teacher. The two aimed to “create this sound in the lab by swinging sticks quickly through the air”….Howling and Howling — Annoying as noise can be, moaning and groaning don’t help to alleviate the problem. Howling does. So does Howling. Alan Howling and D. H . Howling. Christopher Howls, meanwhile, has an eye on acoustical catastrophes. Alan Howling at the Swiss Plasma Center tinkers with new technology to perform a fairly conventional acoustic service: active noise cancellation….The persistence of time — Peter Shaw tells of, and then shows, the strangeness of time. He wrote to Feedback at the end of January 2023: “Can any New Scientist readers beat this for a delay between writing and acceptance of a paper? Ours has just been accepted – in Austral Ecology – after 11 years and 15 journals!  …

What Has God Done Lately? Satan, Buddha, Fate, Brown Sauce

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

God’s recent works — What has God done lately? Professionally, much of God’s work these days aims to help humans fly more safely, more efficiently and more profitably. As head of the Institute for Aircraft Cabin Systems at Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, Prof. Dr Ralf God is a respected presence in the field of aeronautics. God’s recent paper “A holistic aircraft cabin metamodel as an approach towards an interconnected digitised cabin lifecycle” – prepared in collaboration with colleagues – was presented a few months ago…Satan, Buddha and Fate — But what of Satan? What of Buddha? What of Fate? On the public record, Satan has been unproductive recently. But in the 1980s, Jozef Satan applied his expertise at handling high heat. The result was documented by the government of Czechoslovakia in a patent called “Method of liquid waste organical matters liquidation”. The heat is key to…Brown sauce adventures — When you chew a gob of delicious food, your mouth hosts a circus of mechanical and chemical activities. Dengyong Liu and colleagues at Bohai University in Jinzhou, China, have been teasing out what happens, moment to moment, to the bits and bobs and boluses of food and saliva as a person chows down on the Chinese dish stewed pork with brown sauce. From time to time, they publish a new research study…

Why Pipe Smokers’ Personalities Are Resistant to Cancer, Philosophically

Research studies about the Relation Between Pipe Smokers’ Personalities and Cancer; about Smoking and Drinking, Attractiveness and Addiction; and about 57 people; about a Heavily Bearded Philosopher in Women’s Underwear; and about the question “When Should Philosophers Sacrifice Utilitarians?” are featured in the “Super Advanced Theories: Philosophers and Smokers” column in the special Super-Advanced Theories issue (volume 29, number 1) of the magazine.

You can read that article free online. Better still, buy a copy of the issue (it’s in PDF form). Or better better still, subscribe to the magazine!