Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 50

A Look at the Looooooooong-Almost-Dripping, Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment

The folks at Today I Found Out take a look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment:

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

The first epochs of that experiment are documented in the study “The Pitch Drop Experiment,” R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.

Industrial mysteries: Where’d That Chemical Come From?

Mystery abounds, in little ways, in the industries that supply chemicals. Derek Lowe, writing in Chemical World, opens the curtain on some of those mysteries:

So the world of chemical supply is far from straightforward, and it can be affected in unpredictable ways. The last two years have illustrated some of these…

The complications become apparent. When you order a compound or reagent, it may be difficult to impossible to tell where it really came from. An extreme example is an alkaloid called sparteine, which is used in small amounts in chiral synthesis. It appears that someone isolated a very large batch of it for some reason (perhaps about 20 or 25 years ago) and nearly all the commercial sparteine since then traces back to that same drum, sold and re-sold in catalogue after catalogue. Eventually it was in short supply, and it turned out that no one was actually making it at all!

Adventures in Mailing

Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment:

Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that the great majority of the unpackaged items they sent through the USPS made it to their destination. A football, a rose, a feather duster, a single ski, a coconut, a large wheel of stinky cheese, and, in fact, a pair of new, expensive tennis shoes. When the shoes were picked up at the neighborhood PO, the laces had even been tied more tightly together. “The Postal Service appears to be amazingly tolerant of the foibles of its public,” the research crew concluded, exuding, in their acknowledgments, a kind of warmth toward humankind as represented by the USPS.

Pelish alludes to Jeff Van Bueren’s article “Postal Experiments”, which was published in Annals of Improbable Research  vol. 6, no. 4. Postal Record, published by the National Association of Letter Carriers, wrote its own appreciation, in 2011, of  Van Bueren’s study.

Rauks are Rocks

alerted us to this study, saying “I’ve been a geology nerd for fifty-plus years. I was today years old when I learned that a type of rocks exists which is officially named… rauks.” The study is:

“Limestone Sea Stacks (Rauks) Record Past Sea Levels and Rocky Coast Evolution in the Baltic Sea (Gotland and Fårö Islands, Sweden),” Mateusz C. Strzelecki,  Filip Duszyński,  Sebastian Tyszkowski, and  Łukasz Zbucki, Frontiers in Earth Science, 2022.

Ig Nobel Prizes in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Crossword Puzzle

The Ig Nobel Prizes have again turned up in a crossword puzzle, this time as an answer in the August 2, 2022 puzzle in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. The clue for one of the down words is:

23 ___ Satiric Science Prize for “research that makes people laugh then think”

By our lazy count, this is the seventh time the Ig Nobel Prizes have appeared in a major crossword puzzle (if there is such a thing as a major crossword puzzle) in an English-language publication. The New York Times used it in their puzzle on May 3, 2022. The Week used it in their puzzle on October 19, 2015. The New York Times used it in their puzzle on December 20, 2020. The Wall Street Journal used it in their puzzle January 23, 2021. The New Yorker used it in their puzzle April 5, 2021. The Los Angeles Times used it in their puzzle on September 4, 2021.

The Igs have also been an answer on the Jeopardy! TV program eight times or so.

All of this is, of course, puzzling.

(Thanks to Sandy Sutherland for bringing it to our attention.)

Ringtones and Memories for Frog-Eating Bats

There’s something for almost everyone in this new study about an adventure involving ringtones and frog-eating bats:

“Long-Term Memory in Frog-Eating Bats,” M. May Dixon, Patricia L. Jones, Michael J. Ryan, Gerald G. Carter, and Rachel A. Page, bioRxiv, 2022. The authors report:

We captured 49 wild adult T. cirrhosus, individually marked them, and trained them to fly to a novel, artificial sound (one of two ringtones: “trained-A” or “trained-B”). After training, bats spontaneously generalized the association and flew to other ringtones. We then trained the bats to discriminate between their trained ringtone and three other unrewarded ringtones. Before release, these ‘experienced’ bats had retrieved rewards in response to flying to their trained ringtone at least 40 times over 11 to 27 days.

We recaptured eight of the 49 experienced bats (seven males and one female) 356–1531 days after their initial release. We retested them on their trained ringtone under the same conditions as their original training….

Our results demonstrate remarkably long memories in wild frog-eating bats, with individuals remembering a learned foraging association for up to 4.2 years without reinforcement in the wild. This duration is comparable to that reported for corvids and primates.

Double-Hart Invitation to an Ig

Briget and Chris Hart have been part of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony for quite a while now. In the pre-pandemic years, they would journey from their home in Florida to be part of the audience at Sanders Theatre, on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the pandemic years, they have proudly and skillfully flown paper airplanes as part of the online ceremony.

In this new video, the Harts invite you to join them in joining us for the 32nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which will be webcast on Thursday, September 15, 2022.

An English Lesson for Korean Speakers: Laugh First, and Then Think

We cannot help recommending this English language lesson, by Joey쌤, titled “중학교 3학년 천재(정사열) Lesson 3 Laugh First and Then Think : The Ig Nobel Prize 본문 해설“. It is intended primarily for Korean speakers:

An analysis of journal articles winning Ig Nobel prizes during 2011–2020

(pictured here, below) of the University of Hong Kong analyzed several years’ worth of Ig Nobel Prize-winning studies. He published a paper telling how he did it, and what he found. You can download the paper. Here’s the citation:

“Not just nickel-and-dime: An analysis of journal articles winning Ig Nobel prize during 2011–2020,” Andy Wai Kan Yeung, Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, vol. 27, no. 1, 2022, pp. 93-99.

The paper reports:

There were 89 Ig Nobel prize-winning journal articles indexed by Scopus. On average, they were cited 42.5 ± 102.4 times, published in journals with mean impact factor of 3.476 ± 4.102, and mentioned 947.3 ± 2887.2 times and 263.2 ± 502.7 times on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. Over half of them were published in the first quartile journals and awarded within 2 years since publication.Though Ig Nobel prize was originally intended to be satirical, prize-winning articles themselves were indeed impactful in the academia.

It has been suggested that “mentioned 947.3 ± 2887.2 times” is a statistical rarity worth pondering.

A Most Welcoming Cat

Professor Jean Berko Gleason‘s cat, Foster, was featured as “Cat of the Day” on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”, in connection with Foster’s upcoming role in the 32nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.