Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 5

Learn Some English: “Laugh Then Think”

Want to learn some English? Try “Lesson 3 – Laugh First and Then Think“, a lesson from the third year of middle school, presented by South Korea’s EnglishTutorTV.      

Forgetting in Forgetting

In remembering that something was forgotten, some forgetting can still occur. This study serves as an example of that: “I forgot that you existed: Role of memory accessibility in the gender citation gap,” Veronica X. Yan, Amy N. Arndt, Katherine Muenks, and Marlone D. Henderson. American Psychologist, epub 2024. (Thanks to Chris McManus for bringing […]

Dead Duck Day 2025 — Celebrate on June 5

This year’s Dead Duck Day official celebration will be in the Azores. And of course you can celebrate it wherever you are. The celebration will happen on June 5, 2025, Thursday, 15:55 [Azores time], at the Museum Carlos Machado, Santo André Center, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, Azores. This will be the 30th Dead Duck […]

Is Anything That’s Alive Kind of Complicated?

Question: Is anything that’s alive kind of complicated? Answer: Now that you mention it, yes. Here’s a little (but this little is a lot) of what people have managed to figure out about what’s happening moment to moment in a wee, tiny little bacterium that has a fancy name (“Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655“). You can […]

Improbable Research in Baltimore this Weekend

Marc Abrahams will be the science Guest of Honor (note the uppercase letters) at Balticon, the scifi convention in Baltimore, May 23-26. Improbability and things related to the Ig Nobel Prize will be scattered throughout the proceedings.

Does Health Insurance Make You Fat?

This study asks and answers a simple question: “Does Health Insurance Make You Fat?” Jay Bhattacharya, Kate Bundorf, Noemi Pace, and Neeraj Sood, NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] working paper no. 15163, July 2009. (Thanks to Grover Weston for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain: “We find weak evidence that more generous […]

Calculating the guano-equivalent output of NYC residents

A simple calculation was described in the caption to the photo you see here, when that photo appeared in the report “The U.S. empire was built on bird dung” by Sunjata Gupta, in the January 2025 issue of Science News. The caption says: “From roughly 1845 to 1880, prospectors in Peru (shown here loading up […]

Diamonds from Tequila, and More

On Tuesday, May 13, 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winner Javier Morales, of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Mexico, will give a talk about “DIAMANTES DE TEQUILA, LOS IG NOBEL Y MÁS” [diamonds from tequila, the Ig Nobel Prizes, and more], at the DICITEC conference, in Hermosillo, Mexico. You can watch it online, starting at […]

Apprising apprise

The Ig Nobel Prizes are part of what is more or less an apprisal of the word apprise, supplied by the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Big Ideas about Brine Shrimp and Other Stuff

Lots of big ideas about brine shrimp and lots of other stuff are on display in this paper: “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’, ” Ewelina Jarosz, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 38, no. 1, 2025. (Thanks to Ron Josephson for bringing this to […]