Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 425

Saturday: Improbable Research show @ Chicago AAAS

Join us for the annual big Ig Nobel Show at the AAAS Annual meeting, this Saturday night!

Saturday, February 15, 2014, 8:00-10:00 pm.

AAAS Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, USA — Fairmont Chicago Hotel, Moulin Rouge Ballroom.

Marc Abrahams will give the latest Ig Nobel / Improbable news, and then you will meet:

Prof. Kate Clancy  will explain — and demonstrate, with help from the  Twin City Derby Girls and the Chicago Outfit — the significance of the study ”Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby“.
Ig Nobel Prize winner Brian Crandall will explain the experimental  swallowing and excreting of a parboiled shrew.
Bethany Brookshire, aka SciCurious, will do a 24/7 Lecture on the topic: “The Brain”
Ig Nobel Prize winner Prof. Brad Bushman will explicate how his team demonstrated that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.
Prof. Kate Clancy  will do a 24/7 Lecture on the topic: “Vaginal pH”
Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr. Elena Bodnar will tell and show why and how she invented of the Chernobyl-inspired Emergency Bra.

This session (unlike much of the AAAS meeting) is open to the public, free!

Marginal image: nude bishop carrying his head

Here is another of the peculiar drawings that enliven the margins of a manuscript, made in or around the year 1350, of Jacques de Longuyon‘s poem “Les Voeux du Paon” (English translation: “Vows of the Peacock”).The Morgan Library owns a copy (Morgan Library MS G 24) and has put some of these images online. Here are a few, each with a description provided by the library:

Fol. 029v, Nude bishop : margin, left, margin, lower.

Ball squeezing – Kick Butt™

Ethnomusicologist Dr. Verna Gillis (previously an assistant professor at Brooklyn College and Carnegie Mellon University, US), has just recently been granted a US design patent for her ‘Ball’. (Jan. 7th, 2014)

More accurately named as the Kick Butt Ball™, which is described as “… a novel spin on a stress ball, with one side shaped like bulbous buttocks!”

Here she is performing a musical rendition of the Kick Butt Ball™ advertising promo.

Available here ($5.99 each plus shipping)

Also see: Ball squeezing and creativity

Magazine: the special Ig Nobel issue

The special  Ig Nobel issue (vol. 19, no. 6) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out!

Articles include “The 24-7 Lectures“, “Improbable Medical Review“, “Ig® Nobel Limericks: Beetles, Cows, Intoxication“, and more, more, more, including new helpings of “Improbable Research Review”, “Boys Will Be Boys”, “Soft Is Hard”, and other outstandingly improbable research snippets from many fields and countries.

Mel (right) says it’s swell.

Click on the Mel’s face to see the table of contents, buy the e-book version (first download a free preview of it, if you like!), or subscribe to the paper version.

Dapanophobia: “Morbid penuriousness”

To those who compile collections of trivial and spurious words for phobias: here’s a brand new old one to add to the list.

From the November 19, 1904 New York Medical Journal, volume LXXX (issue 21), page 987:

Web searches for “dapanophobia” finds absolutely nothing, except for this one paragraph published in various venues. “δαπανοφοβία” finds nothing either. Maybe if we conjugated the Greek word some other way, we could find some evidence for Dr. Achilles Rose’s assertion that this word was in use. Greek speakers, please let us know.

[image error]

Photo from “Empire State Notables”, 1914

There are several online-searchable books out there by Dr. Achilles Rose (what a name!), in both English, but none mention dapanophobia. Mostly they are exercises in pedantry, about barbaric English words derived inaccurately from Greek, and doctors’ shameful inability to write good Greek. Then there’s one about carbolic acid, and his most famous book, about the various human disasters of disease and death that accompanied Napoleon’s campaign in Russia.

“δαπανων” means “expenditure” according to Google Translate, so this looks like the right word for a psychological aversion to spending money. But does the world need such a word?

Follow Amboceptor on Twitter: @AmboceptorBlog

The Mirror Reversal Effect – a new angle

If you’re one of those people who looks into a mirror and wonders – ‘Why is left-right reversed, but not up-down?’ – then you’re not alone.

“No agreed-upon account of mirror reversal is currently available although it has been discussed for more than two thousand years since Plato.”

- explains mirror researcher Yohtaro Takanoa, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, who has been trying to find a consistent explanation for the enigmatic ‘Mirror Reversal’ effect for more than fifteen years. He’s written more than half a dozen scholarly papers on the subject, the latest of which (the source of the quote above), is awaiting publication in the journal Philosophical Psychology : ‘Mirror reversal of slanted objects: A psycho-optic explanation’

“The proposed theory assumes different causes of mirror reversal depending on whether an object’s left-right axis is parallel or perpendicular to a mirror’s surface. This theory was later criticized in that it provided no explanation when the left-right axis is neither parallel nor perpendicular but at an intermediate angle between zero and 90 degrees with a mirror. This article completes the theory by presenting psycho-optic analyses to show that mirror reversal at an intermediate angle can be explained within the same basic framework of the theory.“

Note: The photo above, provided by the professor, shows a mirror view in which the letter ‘C’ (which is stuck to the wall) is reversed, whilst the letter ‘F’ (a hand-held cutout) is not.

Here is a video of the late Professor Feynman sharing his views on the enigma.

BONUS: (new PLOS ONE paper) ‘Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study’

Saturday: Improbable Research show @ Chicago AAAS

Join us for the annual big Ig Nobel Show at the AAAS Annual meeting, this Saturday night!

Saturday, February 15, 2014, 8:00-10:00 pm.

AAAS Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, USA — Fairmont Chicago Hotel, Moulin Rouge Ballroom.

Marc Abrahams will give the latest Ig Nobel / Improbable news, and then you will meet:

Prof. Kate Clancy  will explain — and demonstrate, with help from the  Twin City Derby Girls and the Chicago Outfit — the significance of the study ”Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby“.
Ig Nobel Prize winner Brian Crandall will explain the experimental  swallowing and excreting of a parboiled shrew.
Bethany Brookshire, aka SciCurious, will do a 24/7 Lecture on the topic: “The Brain”
Ig Nobel Prize winner Prof. Brad Bushman will explicate how his team demonstrated that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.
Prof. Kate Clancy  will do a 24/7 Lecture on the topic: “Vaginal pH”
Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr. Elena Bodnar will tell and show why and how she invented of the Chernobyl-inspired Emergency Bra.

This session (unlike much of the AAAS meeting) is open to the public, free!

Leaping lizards, and some who simply fall

Two looks at how and when lizards fall. First:

“Total recoil: Perch compliance alters jumping performance and kinematics in green anole lizards,” Gilman C, Bartlett MB, Gillis G, Irschick DJ., Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 215, 2012, pp. 220-226.

The authors explain: “Many species of the arboreal lizard genus Anolis occupy habitats in which they must jump to and from unsteady perches, e.g. narrow branches, vines, grass and leaves. Anoles therefore often use compliant perches that could alter jump performance…. We observed that lizards lost contact with compliant horizontal perches prior to perch recoil, and increased perch compliance resulted in decreased jump distance and takeoff speed, likely because of the loss of kinetic energy to the flexion of the perch. However, the most striking effect of perch compliance was an unexpected one; perch recoil following takeoff resulted in the lizards being struck on the tail by the perch, even on the narrowest perches. This interaction between the perch and the tail significantly altered body positioning during flight and landing.”

(The Anole Annals wrote an appreciation of this experiment.)

Second, a look back at lizardfall in a California oak woodland.

Third, a look back at frozen lizards falling from Florida trees.

Van Gogh, Lady Gaga and the implications of eccentricity (study)

Attn. artists! Can you get a higher appraisal for yourself and your art by behaving more eccentrically? Say, by hacking off your own earlobe or “cavorting around in little more than a thong”? Such questions have been examined in a new study from Dr. Eric R. Igou (University of Limerick, Ireland) and Dr. Wijnand A P van Tilburg (University of Southampton, England) which tested, for the first time, the hypothesis that eccentricity increases perceptions of artistic capacity and quality of art. A series of experiments investigated various scenarios.

● Whether, for example, experimental participants would rate Van Gogh’s work higher if they were first informed of the famous ear-hacking incident.

● Or if Lady Gaga is or isn’t perceived as a highly skilled artist, depending on participants viewing photos of her behaving eccentrically or (relatively) normally.

● Or whether ratings of Joseph Beuys’s artworks would vary if viewers were informed that he had “carried roadside stones on his head to the construction site of his cottage, and that he continued doing this for the rest of his life.”

The conclusion :

“In everyday life, people are often confronted with judgments about art. We found that these judgments depend on the displayed eccentricity of the artist as long as the art is unconventional and the displayed eccentricity seems authentic. This research thus shows that the results of creative endeavors are clearly not solely determined by the quality of the creative outcomes but also depend crucially on the perceived degree of eccentricity of the artist – a characteristic that is peripheral to the artwork but nonetheless impactful for its evaluation.”

‘From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation.’ is scheduled for publication in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

Note: The official ‘Lady Gaga Finger Poster‘ is available from her website for around $10.

 

Hannah Julich joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS)

Hannah Julich has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). She says:

It is hard to tell from the high winds, but my hair falls well past my waist. Here, it assists me in taking sediment cores from a frozen lake. I am a doctoral student in ecology and environmental science at Iowa State University. My research in paleolimnology focuses on using palynological techniques to reconstruct landscape changes and water quality through time. The hideously dangerous chemicals necessary for processing my samples have earned me the nickname ‘the hydrofluoric acid lady,’ typically uttered by wide-eyed undergraduates who studiously avoid my lab bench. (On the web page with my official lab profile, my hair in a bun for reasons of laboratory safety.)

Hannah M. Julich, LFHCfS

PhD Student

Iowa State Limnology Laboratory

Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology

Ames, Iowa, USA