Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 42

Detective Story: The Case of Dimples and ‘Not’ Not Being There

Niels Berg Olsen sent this (fabulously) discerning note:

I enjoyed reading your item on Greek cheek in your fabulous book This is Improbable, Too [Printed and bound in Denmark…”].I notice a difference in the text in the book and in your news item in the Guardian:https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/jul/05/highereducation.researchIn the Guardian you wrote: “The report explains the significance, if any, of the number 14,141”In the book the text is better: “The report does not explain the significance, if any, of the number 14,141.”NielsDenmarkDetective WorkIntrigued, I checked back in the records. It turns out that my original version had a missing “not” — the missing-ness being obvious because the sentence was blatantly awkward without it. But neither I nor anyone else caught the typo at that first stage, and somehow the text that got printed in the newspaper had been altered. That sentence — without its “not” — had been reworded to remove the awkwardness, which had the effect of reversing the intended meaning.Years later, when this story of the research about Greek-children’s-dimples was included in one of the book collections of my Guardian columns, the text appeared as it always should have, with the “not” present, not absent.The lessons, if any, to be drawn here: (1) Don’t immediately believe anything you read anywhere; and (2) the world never has enough proofreaders.Here’s video of a fun event Melissa Franklin, Gus Rancatore, Corky White, and (the fabulous) Robin Abrahams did at Harvard Book Store, when the book was published:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBwR_7NO3_kUPDATE FROM DENMARKAfter this blog item appeared, Niels Berg Olsen sent another note. It says:

I have always been impressed, and thankful, for your fast replies to my mails. You probably receives Hell-of-a-Lot of mails each day, due to your position as the Founder-of-the-Ig-Nobel-Prize – and there is a 6 hours time difference between DK:CET and USA:EST!

I would appreciate it very much – no, VERY MUCH, if you would publish a follow-up-issue to my favorite books: This is Improbable and This is Improbable, Too. I have read and reread them both many times. You have also helped me with files of some of the source articles, fex sending me a pdf-file of the article about the Danish neck, mentioned in Improbable, Too, p.61. It was not available to me at Danish libraries.

Especially interesting for me has of course been the 5 chapters in your first book and the 5 chapters in the second book about Danish publications. I appreciate your humorous, and tongue-in-cheek-attitude very much!

Niels Berg Olsen
Denmark

Deep Oesophagus, Snoozing Grumpy Face, Deep Secrets

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

Deep Oesophagus — Scientists, as a group, like to think they behave in ways a little distinct from the herd. The herd, as a herd, likes to think so, too. From time to time, Feedback receives furtive notes from a keen observer of scientists; artful reflections on general behaviours that have caught this person’s professional eye. This observer could be described as a “senior figure in the European science community”. In homage to the famous secret source “Deep Throat”, this observer will be identified here as “Deep Oesophagus”. Here is their first confidential dispatch….Snoozing Grumpy Face — “Grumpy face during adult sleep: A clue to negative emotion during sleep?” is a study published not long ago in the Journal of Sleep Research….Deeper, Eosophageal Secrets — Biological oesophaguses, which connect the throat to the lower portions of the digestive system, sometimes harbour deep secrets. Some of these secrets, in some of these oesophaguses, have religious significance. Here are two of them. “Esophagus detection using deep learning method”, a paper given at a conference in 2021, applies a clever bit of engineering to a meaty problem. One of chicken meat….

A look back at the prize-winning anti-car-jacking flamethrower

Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong were awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, “A Security System for a Vehicle“)

Now, in 2023, The South African news organization takes a look back at one of South Africa’s most spectacular but least financially rewarding inventions. The historic video news report you see here was done by the Associated Press:

Also Looking Back: Tamagotchi

And, not directly related to that, the Spanish newspaper El Periodico looks at the fate of a different Ig Nobel Prize winner: “Yet another wave of popularity for [the 1997 Ig Nobel Economics Prize-winning] Tamagotchi. Why?” 

 

Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery: 2022 Ig Informal Lecture

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it.

The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth, for their study “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery.”

REFERENCE: “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery,” Peter A.G.M. de Smet and Nicholas M. Hellmuth, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, vol. 16, no. 2-3, 1986, pp. 213-262.

Foot Note to Science History: Bill Lipscomb’s plaster left foot on display

Just stumbled across a big box of press clippings from the 90s. Here’s Bill Lipscomb with the plaster cast of his left foot on display. This article in the Harvard Gazette on October 2, 1997, says:

IG NOBEL FEET: William N. Lipscomb, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1976, holds his foot up against a display of his cast foot. His and other Nobel Laureates’ plaster feet are on display at the Sackler Museum to celebrate the Ig Nobel Awards to be held next Thursday at Sanders Theatre. See story, page 11.

Sequencing Gregor Mendel and a Pea Plant / Turtles, Elephants, Bottlecaps Down

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

Down, with turtles and elephants — The fabled dominance of the hare by the tortoise has an underground counterpart of sorts in a look at turtles and elephants in times gone by. The elephants came out on top in a 2014 study called “Between the feet of elephants: Turtles as a common element of the associated fauna of proboscideans”. But turtles hog all the attention in a new report called “100 million years of turtle paleoniche dynamics enable the prediction of latitudinal range shifts in a warming world”. The two works serve as reminders that some old conjectures and beliefs really do stand atop shards of physical evidence….Sequencing Gregor Mendel and a Pea Plant — The recent unearthing of the body of Gregor Mendel, so that modern scientists could analyse the DNA of the person who founded the science of genetics, makes possible a spectacular comparison, of man to pea. Mendel is famous for his experiments with pea plants, noticing characteristics that seemed to be passed from parents to their offspring. Šárka Pospíšilová and her colleagues at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic laid out details of how they meddled with Mendel in several studies, one of which is called “Body remains of the founder of genetics Gregor Johann Mendel”.Thanks to them, it now becomes possible, and conceivably enlightening, to compare the DNA of Mendel with that of a pea plant….Bottlecap Down — “There have been few reports of ingestion of bottlecaps worldwide.” With that subtle statement, Mattis Bertlich, Friedrich Ihler, Jan Sommerlath Sohns, Martin Canis and Bernhard Weiss introduce a real-life detective story, told by the investigators themselves in the pages of the medical journal Dysphagia….

The Men / Small-Penises / Fast-Cars Research Study

“We found evidence that when men were manipulated to feel that they had a relatively small penis, they ranked sports cars as more desirable than when they felt relatively well endowed and that this effect was most pronounced in men 30 and over,” say the authors in this new study:

“Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link,” Daniel C. Richardson [pictured here], Joseph Devlin, John S. Hogan, and Chuck Thompson, https://psyarxiv.com/uy7ph, January 10, 2023. (Thanks to Richard Stephens for bringing this to our attention.)

The authors, most of them at University College London, report: “In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is, reasoning that, on average, these males will feel that relatively and subjectively their own penis was smaller; compared to those told that the average penis size was smaller than true average. We then asked them to rate how much they would like to own a sports car. These facts and questions were buried amongst other items giving information and asking for product ratings, so that our hypothesis was masked from participants. We found that males, and males over 30 in particular, rated sports cars as more desirable when they were made to feel that they had a small penis.”

Charles DeLorey joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHfC)

Charles DeLorey has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He says:

I am a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Boston University, having completed my Master’s at Imperial College London (2021) and my BS in CS at Tufts University (2020).

Charles DeLorey, MRes., LFHCfS
PhD student in Mechanical Engineering
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Which Is More Important: Talent or Luck?: 2022 Ig Informal Lecture

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it.

The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.

REFERENCE: “Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure,” Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, Advances in Complex Systems, vol. 21, nos. 3 and 4, 2018.

Dogged Hospital Presence, Unpleasant Polygons; Shape and Shapelessness

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

Dogged hospital presence  — Dogs should be kept out of human (that is, non-veterinary) hospitals – or, depending on circumstances, welcomed into them. Research papers make the case one way and another.“Towards dog-free hospital campuses in India”, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, nods to hospitals that are, or might be, visited by stray dogs. These are also known in the literature by the old sobriquet “unbridled dogs”, the technical term “free-ranging dogs” and the zippy nickname FRDs. The report dishes delicious gossip about them…Unpleasant polygons — What can you do with a broken stick? The question fascinates mathematicians, well, some of them. Lumberjacks, too – again, some of them. One difference between mathematicians, some of them, and lumberjacks, most of them, is that mathematicians publish a lot of academic papers. (In long-ago days, when lumberjacks roamed free in the world’s forests, they supplied virtually all of the paper for those mathematicians’ papers. The two groups are no longer so professionally entwined.) A study, “On the probability of forming polygons from a broken stick”, examines what is possible…Shape and shapelessness — … Tanya Behrisch at Simon Fraser University in Canada writes about the soundness of shapeless listening in “Shapeless listening to the more-than-human world: Coherence, complexity, mattering, indifference”. Shapeless listening, says Behrisch…