Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 52

Throw a paper airplane at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony!

The ceremony web page tells how to make your paper-plane-throwing video, and submit it.

A Complex Analysis of the Unfolding Folding Chair Situation

Sit down, if you can, and read this study about what it takes to get a folding plastic chair to the point where you can sit in it:

“A study of design demand of applying quality function deployment in plastic folding chairs,” Chun Tung Chen, Applied Mechanics and Materials, vol. 284, pp. 3632-3636. The author, at Shu-Te University, Taiwan, reports:

[T]he rise of consumer awareness and enhanced demand for product quality from the public have shifted the design of plastic folding chair from general folding chair to the designers perception oriented chairs. Hence, the study applied quality function deployment to establish user demand for plastic folding chairs, inducing the five expectations for plastic folding chair through the procedures in quality function deployment, namely into “aesthetics,” ‘convenience,’ ‘structural safety,’ ‘comfort,’ and ‘environmental protection.’

Catching up with two humans who lived, for a time, as a goat and an otter, respectively

The human who, of all the humans who have tried living life as a goat has become the most celebrated by fellow humans, looks back on his experience. NRC interviews and profiles Thomas Thwaites, and also checks in with Charles Foster, who lived parts of his life as different kinds of animals. The NRC profile says, in part:

Their projects earned Foster and Thwaites a shared Ig Nobel Prize in 2016 , a science prize for frivolous-looking research that is nonetheless thought-provoking. And then there’s Geoffroy Delorme who lived for seven years with roe deer in a Norman forest ( L’Homme-chevreuil , translated in 2021 as The Deer Man ). And there’s David Abram’s book, Becoming Animal (2010), a philosophical exercise centered on the fact that we don’t see the world “as it is,” because our brains rapidly replace everything our eyes see with abstract “concepts.”

“It has undoubtedly to do with our seeking a new relationship with nature,” says Thwaites. What he and Foster have in common is their attempt to bridge the gap between humans and animals. “And we both realize how much comfort you have to give up when you try to live as a non-human.”

The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

Each of them documented his experience in a book:

  GoatMan; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human , Thomas Thwaites, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1616894054.Being a Beast, Charles Foster, Profile Books, 2016, ISBN 978-1781255346.

Charles Foster subsequently wrote another book in which he, like Thomas Thwaites, further contemplates the experience of being a human. That book is: Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, Charles Foster, Metropolitan Books, 2021

Devotion by a Statistical Researcher about an Efficient Mystic [research study]

Statistics an be compiled about anything, independent of the question: is there any point in gathering statistics about this thing? The following study may be good fodder for teachers who wish to discuss that question with students:

“The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of Daily Words and Writing Time,” Emilio Matricciani, Open Journal of Statistics, 2022, 12, 155-167. (Thanks to Trevor Lipscombe for bringing this to our attention.) The author explains:

Maria Valtorta (1897-1961, Italian mystic)—bedridden since 1934 because paralyzed—wrote in Italian 13,193 pages of 122 school notebooks concerning alleged mystical visions on Jesus’ life, during World War II and few following years. The contents—about 2.64 million words—are now scattered in different books. She could write from 2 to 6 hours without pausing, with steady speed, and twice in the same day. She never made corrections and was very proficient in Italian. We have studied her writing activity concerning her alleged mystical experience with the main scope of establishing the time sequence of daily writing. This is possible because she diligently annotated the date of almost every text. We have reconstructed the time series of daily words and have converted them into time series of writing time, by assuming a realistic speed of 20 words per minute, a reliable average value of fast handwriting speed, applicable to Maria Valtorta. She wrote for 1340 days, about 3.67 years of equivalent contiguous writing time, mostly concentrated in the years 1943 to 1948. This study is a first approach in evaluating the effort done, in terms of writing time, by a mystic turned out to be a very effective literary author.

Effect of Chocolate Packaging on the Mind of a First-Time Consumer [research study]

“Chocolate Packaging Cues and First Moment of Truth: An Exploratory Study on Young Consumers’ Mind” [ by Suraj Kushe Shekhar and P.T. Raveendran, published in Management Science Letters, vol. 3, no. 7. 2013, pp. 1851-1862] is a featured study in “Chocolate Packaging Research Review“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research. The study reports:

Results showed that an attractive package design was of paramount significance in first purchase of chocolate bars….

An interesting observation worth noting was, among 72 percent who purchased a newly launched chocolate bar based on an attractive pack, 61 percent regretted having purchased it. These findings clearly portrayed that consumers were misled by good-looking chocolate packages. 8 percent of the consumers also had the opinion that the nutritional information and nutritional claims printed on chocolate packages were misleading. However, this did not prevent them from trying out different brands of chocolate bars….

However, it was concluded that a very strong advertisement with a very attractive pack together could sell the chocolate bar with over 94 percent of the respondents agreeing to it.

96 percent of the students did not follow the storage instructions given on packages.

Banana String Detection [research study]

The field of banana-string detection has taken a big or little step with publication of this new study:

“Target detection of banana string and fruit stalk based on YOLOv3 deep learning network,” Rihong Zhang, Xiaomin Li, Lixue Zhu, Maokun Zhong, and Yihua Gao, in 2021 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things Engineering (ICBAIE), pp. 346-349. IEEE, 2021. The authors, at Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, China, explain:

“The average accuracy of banana stalk and banana string target detection is 88.45% and 97.96% respectively.”

Walking in a crowd, how do (and don’t) people go with the flow?

How don’t and do pedestrians collide? Ig Nobel Prize winner Alessandro Corbetta, a physicist based at Eindhoven University of Technology, explains, in this short video.

The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.

The team documented that research, in the study “Physics-based modeling and data representation of pairwise interactions among pedestrians,” Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper A. Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, Physical Review E, vol. 98, no. 062310, 2018.

Dead Duck Day 2022

The COVID era continues to take its toll on Dead Duck Day, the international celebration of an incident that took its toll on a duck in Rotterdam and yet gave inspiration to millions of people to wonder at the mysteries that abound in nature.

In a one-year break with tradition, Dead Duck Day 2022 will be a day for personal meditation on the dangers and delights of birds, glass windows, and the curious adventure of daily life. We suggest you mount your own personal DDD celebration in some delightful location where windows, ducks, and humans often interact with each other.

Here are some quick looks back at several Dead Duck Days (keep in mind that the pandemic arrived in 2020): 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

Ig Nobel Duck

The mallard duck that is a vital part of Dead Duck Day became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer, Kees Moeliker, the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize.

The incident — involving two ducks and a glass-clad museum — happened on June 5, 1995. June 5 thus became the date of the annual celebration at the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, and at simultaneous informal DDD gathering sites around the world.

It is hoped and intended that Kees Moeliker, the scientist who witnessed and documented the incident, and who many years later became director of the museum, will next year again lead a joy-filled assembly of Rotterdam residents and visitors, as they together resume the full, on-site Dead Duck Day celebration. (By tradition, the celebration comprises a re-enactment of the incident, a brief discussion, and then a stroll to a nearby Chinese restaurant for a six-course duck dinner.)

How It All Began

If you are one of the few people who is not already conversant with the history of Dead Duck Day, please relax and enjoy this recording of Kees Moeliker’s TED Talk about it:

Tributes from Yesteryear

Here’s a 2018 tribute to Dead Duck Day, by the folks at Today I Found Out:

 

A 2015 Tribute to Dead Duck Day, by Buzzfeed.

A 2013 tribute to Dead Duck Day, by The Mary Sue.

And of course video of a performance, in 2015 in London, of the opera inspired by Dead Duck Day:

NHK special about walking-with-a-mobile-phone prize winner

Claudio Feliciani, co-winner of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for kinetics, is the subject of an NHK-World TV special, which you can watch online. NHK explains:

Claudio Feliciani is a Swiss-Italian scientist whose main interest is the movement of crowds. He worked alongside 3 Japanese scientists on a study that examined why people bump into each other when some of them are looking at a smartphone. It won an Ig Nobel Prize, which honors research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. In a Japanophiles interview, Feliciani tells Peter Barakan how he ended up in Japan, and why he finds crowds so fascinating.

(Rare) Poetry of a Scientific Study Title

Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this?  I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.”

The study is:

“The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.