Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 463

‘Silly Walk’ studies (#1)

“Humans have around 50 muscles in each leg, which are arranged in a way that allows us to move in numerous ways. The flexibility of movement in human legs is expressed, for instance, through the different styles of dance that have existed throughout the ages and humorously through TV sketches such as ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’ performed in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

“However,” explains researcher Matthew L. Handford of the Movement Lab at Ohio State University, US, in a 2012 Honors Thesis entitled : ‘Energy Optimality in Novel Movement: Sideways Walking’

“…when humans go from point A to point B, they tend to just choose one of two gaits: walking and running.”

As part of the study, experimental subjects were asked to ‘shuffle’ on a treadmill at up to ten different speeds – from 0.1 m/s to 1.0 m/s – with the top speed depending on the capabilities of the subject. Their gait (example below) speed and oxygen consumption was recorded by supporting equipment.

“We found that the optimal speed across the population was 0.592 m/s with individual minimums differing by an average of 0.041 m/s, and the preferred speeds, averaging 0.583 m/s (standard deviation =0.1437).”

“Another contribution is the measurement of energy costs for sideways walking, which we found to be much higher than normal walking, suggesting why we do not use sideways walking in daily life.“

COMING SOON : Silly walk studies (#2)

Things that pop up in databases. Read at your own risk.

One must be wary of the basic data in databases, for typographical errors creep in. These errors lurk there, waiting to surprise the innocent scholar who seeks knowledge and perhaps truth. These errors are rife.

A prolonged technical discussion with Ivan Oransky led this evening to a stroll through a citation database. Suddenly there popped up a most startling citation:

Penis, C., Anindell, W. A., Penis, H., Eisemann, M., & van der Ende, J. von boning, L.(1986). Perceived depriving parental rearing and depression. British Journal of Psychiatry, 1485, 170-175.

But… that citation turned out to be mangled — filled with typos. Here’s the real citation [you can click on the link to get to the study, if that's your idea of a good time]:

C Perris, W A Arrindell, H Perris,M Eisemann, J van der Ende,and L von Knorring, Perceived depriving parental rearing and depression. BJP February 1986 148:170-5;

Here is a different example, one of many you can easily find if you’re of a mind to go looking: This is a portion of the lengthy list of co-authors listed for the study ”Search for excited leptons in pp collisions at root s= 7 TeV,” published in Physics Letters B, 720, no. 4-5 (2013), p. 309 ff.:

Is “A. Delgado Penis” the real name of that co-author? The database lists an affiliation for that individual: “Ctr Invest Energet Medioambientales & Tecnol CIEM. Madrid”. Perhaps someone reading this blog item will track down the story of A. Delgado Penis, and share that story with the world.

Tim Blais and the accapellization of physics

McGill University physics graduate student Tim Blais sings, in highly coordinated bits and pieces, about physics. Two examples:

Quantum Gravity:

Rolling in the Higgs:

BONUS: An interview with Tim Blais

BONUS (unrelated): If you misspell Tim Blais’s name, you might find yourself reading about a different physicist, on a different continent: Tim Ball.

 

Enhanced Men Seem Satisfied with Women’s Satisfaction with Enhanced Membership

Another study about enhanced membership and satisfaction in venues where males and females interact:

“High Patient Satisfaction after Inflatable Penile Prostheses Implantation Correlates with Female Partner Satisfaction,” Ioannis Vakalopoulos, Spyridon Kampantais, Stavros Ioannidis, Leonidas Laskaridis, Panagiotis Dimopoulos, Chrysovalantis Toutziaris, Michail Koptsis, Gerard D. Henry, Vasileios Katsikas, Journal of Sexual Medicine, epub 2013.  The authors, at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Regional Urology in Shreveport, LA, USA, report:

“69… [inflatable penile prosthesis] patients were evaluated for their pre- and postoperative erectile function and posttreatment satisfaction for themselves and their partners…. Regression analysis suggested a direct linear correlation of satisfaction between the sexual partners as a degree of satisfaction.”

(Thanks to investigator Ivan Oransky for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS (possibly related): An old song about ordinary membership:

Wassersug and the frogs in space

Jason Goldman, writing in The Guardian, today tells of the long history of frogs being sent (by humans) into space for scientific purposes: “Frogs in space: one giant leap indeed“.

Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug [pictured here] has an intimate relationship with the history of frogs in space. Among his publications in that realm:

“Emesis and space motion sickness in amphibians” (2000)
“The Frog in Space (FRIS) Experiment Onboard Space Station Mir: Final Report and Follow-on Studies” (1997)
“Amphibian development in the virtual absence of gravity” (1995)
“Interspecific variation in the behavioral responses of frogs to exotic gravitational stimuli” (1994)
“Behavior of Japanese tree frogs under microgravity on MIR and in parabolic flight” (1994)

Wassersug was awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for biology, for his first-hand report, “On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica.” [Published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.]

“There’s a touching nobility in the Ig Nobel…”

Warwick McFadyen, writing in The Age, perhaps at the the end of a long day, takes a philosophical look at the Ig Nobel Prizes:

A touching nobility can be discovered in the goofiness of life

The world needs more awards to honour absurdity.

…So let us praise the Ig Nobel Prizes, which were announced at the end of last week at Harvard University. The awards are organised by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. They restore one’s faith in humankind’s dogged perseverance to laugh at itself – against all the odds. To paraphase and bend Shakespeare: What a piece of work is a man, how Ig Noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals …

Of course this is the slightly unhinged Hamlet, but still. There’s a touching nobility in the Ig Nobel. It manifests itself in the often neglected ability we have of using that part of our brain where the harmlessly dumb creatures roam; the place where we are busy working to change a piece of spaghetti into string theory….

Improbable Research says the awards are not about ridicule. ”We are honouring achievements that make people laugh, then think. Good achievements can also be odd, funny, and even absurd; so can bad achievements. A lot of good science gets attacked because of its absurdity. A lot of bad science gets revered despite its absurdity.”

Frankly, the world cries out for more such awards. The Literary Review magazine does have its worst piece of writing on sex award, but literature could do much more: plot, character, description, dialogue. There’s sport, politics and business.

In a culture dominated by reality shows, in all their shades of idiocy, a dose of madness of thought, laced with laughter at our inner goofiness, is needed. There is nothing ignoble about that.

A miscellany of marble-manipulation machines

A movie of many machines that make marbles move:

(Thanks to investigator Torgen Norden for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: A machine that makes marbles:

Ig Nobel Q&A

Today we received this note:

Dear Ig Nobel organizers,

For many years, I have wondered if the emphasis is on the first, second or third syllable in the “Ig Nobel”. I couldn’t find it on the web site; sorry if it is there somewhere.

Sincerely,

Ian Putnam

And sent this reply:

Dear Ian,

That depends on how you pronounce it.

Inventing an Artificial Banana (reconfigurable)

Sometimes, if one were to purchase an artificial-fruit display (for example featuring bananas) one may eventually become frustrated – in the sense that the display is not easily re-configured. Thus, one may be left with just one expensive option.

“Currently, the only way to vary the configuration or display of artificial fruit is to purchase the newly desired configuration.”

That was, at least, until the arrival of the ‘ARTIFICIAL FRUIT APPARATUS’ [their caps] invented by Judith J. Miller, of Saint John, Kansas, US, to whom a patent (US 7947344 B2) was issued on May 24, 2011.

“An artificial banana apparatus according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention includes a plurality of artificial banana bodies, each artificial banana body being elongate and curved, each artificial banana body having a stem end and an opposed tip, and each stem end having a channel. The banana apparatus includes a plurality of elongate stems, each stem having a first end telescopically received in a respective channel to allow a length of the stem outside said artificial banana body to be adjusted, each stem having a second end with a magnetic element. The apparatus includes a stem hub having at least one magnetic element complementary to the stem magnetic elements to removably couple the stems to the stem hub, the stem hub having at least two rows of sockets complementary to the stem second ends to receive the stem second ends in at least two rows.”

The drawing above depicts a single artificial banana. Below is a bunch.

 

Modernizing the Roman Thumbs-up-or-down Decision

This patent describes (among other things) an automated way to perform the Roman Emperor’s decision (indicated in the old days — reputedly — by a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down signal, displayed by the emperor) as to whether a gladiator should live or die:

“Monitoring of crowd response to performances,” US patent #6885304, issued Apr 26, 2005 to David Trevor Cliff and Timothy Alan Heath Wilkinson, is for ” Monitoring apparatus and methods for monitoring the reaction of people to a performance use two or more monitoring devices of different types. Output signals from the monitoring devices are combined to produce at least one crowd reaction signal indicative of the reaction of those people to the performance.”

Detail from the patent: