Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 520

A non-lengthy length question about the Hair Club

We received this inquiry about the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS):

Are members monitored for continued luxuriance and effusiveness ?

Should  a Hall of Fame be established for those with historical hirsuteness but who have now retired from the club due to reasons either within or without their control.

Yours recedingly (and never previously luxuriant or flowing),

Dr. Simon Gibbons [pictured here]

Mayo Clinic

The answer is no. Membership is permanent (though any member is of course always free to resign and presumably go off to a monastery).

Patent Camouflage

Imagine that you want to camouflage yourself. One way to do so might be to pick objects from your surroundings and attach them to your clothing. But how exactly? Answers are provided in a new US patent (Jan. 29th 2013) from two Utah-based inventors (both named Morgan). Their patent : entitled ‘Systems and methods for providing modular camouflage’ describes how camouflage material, which may include -

“… natural foliage as selected by the user from the surroundings of the user, such as branches, twigs, grasses, leaves, and bracts.“

- can be attached to one’s clothing with a novel methodology. Providing the effect shown here :

Ig Nobel winner Gideon Gono gives advice about “miracle money”

Ig Nobel prize winner Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, has issued a public warning about what he calls “miracle money.”

Gono was  awarded his Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2009, in the field of mathematics, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

A January 30, 2013 report in the Zimbabwe Mail says:

Gono warns on ‘miracle money’

RESERVE Bank governor Gideon Gono yesterday warned the public against taking Spirit Embassy leader Uebert Angel Mudzanire’s “so-called miracle money” and urged the “man of God” to stop his acts lest he lands the country in trouble with international law….

[Gono said:] “You cannot just wake up in the morning and say that my account has this much money which I cannot tell where it came from and hope that you can have access to it or escape interrogation by authorities. It’s not possible.” … where were these miracle men and women of God during the period 1998 to 2008 when some of us were trying every trick in and outside the book to keep this country afloat?”

BONUS: News report from Nahanda Radio, January 30, 2013: “Zimbabwe had $217 left in the bank“

mini-AIR (January issue): “Clay Modeling and Chocolate Craving”

The January issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include:

Clay Modeling and Chocolate Craving
Fraud Brainstorming
Some details about the AAAS show and the Europe shows
and more

It also has info about upcoming events.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.” (mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just add yourself to the mini-AIR list, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)

Tiny Study: Internet-Ordered Viagra Is Rarely Genuine

The company that manufactures Viagra mounted a tiny study of some of the products called “Viagra” that are sold via some web sites:

“Internet-Ordered Viagra (Sildenafil Citrate) Is Rarely Genuine,” Neil Campbell, John P. Clark, Vera J. Stecher, Irwin Goldstein, Journal of Sexual Medicine, volume 9, issue 11, November 2012, pp. 2943–2951. The authors, at Pfizer Inc and Alvarado Hospital in San Diego, California, explain:

Counterfeit medication is a growing problem. This study assessed the requirement for prescription, cost, origin, and content of medications sold via the Internet and purporting to be the phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor Viagra (sildenafil citrate).

METHODS. Pfizer monitored top search results for the query “buy Viagra” on the two leading Internet search engines in March 2011. Orders were placed from 22 unique Web sites claiming to sell Viagra manufactured by Pfizer. Tablets received were assessed for chemical composition.

RESULTS. No Web site examined required a prescription for purchase or a health screening survey; 90% offered illegal “generic Viagra.” Cost per tablet ranged from $3.28–$33.00. Shipment origins of purchases were Hong Kong (N = 11), the United States (N = 6), and the United Kingdom (N = 2) as well as Canada, China, and India (N = 1 each)…. Of 22 sample tablets examined, 17 (77%) were counterfeit, 4 (18%) were authentic, and 1 (5%) was an illegal generic. Counterfeit tablets were analyzed for sildenafil citrate, the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) of Viagra, and contents varied between 30% and 50% of the label claim….

CONCLUSION. Internet sites claiming to sell authentic Viagra shipped counterfeit medication 77% of the time; counterfeits usually came from non-U.S. addresses and had 30% to 50% of the labeled API claim.

(Thanks to investigator Erwin Kompanje for bringing this to our attention.)

Dumpling Fog in China – a Computer Simulation

Impressive though the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway is (opened  1996) the Zhenjiang branch section does suffer from an occasional meteorological drawback. In the form of ‘Dumpling Fog’.

Prompting Yan Mingliang and colleagues at the Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry (of Education), Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, China, to attempt an algorithmic emulation of the problem using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model for version 2.2 and a digital elevation model in ArcGIS9.3.

“The results were showed as follows: The numerical simulations of a dumpling fog event indicated that: (1) The Zhenjiang section of the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway bas been easy to appearing some dumpling fog weathers. The beneficial engendering conditions of a dumpling fog event were the stable atmospheric environment, the ground surface radiation cooling at night, and the cooling of the warm and wet flow from the southern regions moved through the cooler ground surface. (2) When two branches of airflows from the different directions of the north and south converged in the western part of the Expressway, it was favorable to the standstill of wet air and aerosol particles and it also was one of the main reasons for the developing and maintaining of the dumpling fog weather. (3) The dumpling fog dissipated rapidly when short-wave radiation warmed the air closed to the ground after sunrise. (4) The sensitivity tests of terrain and water system displayed that the distribution of terrains and landforms in the fog area were sensitive to the – - formation of dumpling fog “

See:

Numerical simulations on a dumpling fog event and analysis on the reasons of its engendering under the complicated topography

(Information Science and Engineering (ICISE), 2010 2nd International Conference on Date of Conference: 4-6 Dec. 2010)

NOTE: Despite our best endeavours, Improbable has run into trouble trying to pin down the exact nature of Dumpling Fog. Can any readers help clear it up?

 

Psychology: Everything Matters (more or less, or hardly at all)

Some psychologists find ways to find significance in lots and lots of places, says this study:

“False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, Psychological Science, November 2011, vol. 22, no. 11, pp. 1359-1366. (Thanks to investigators Don Shearman and Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) the authors, at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, explain:

“we show that despite empirical psychologists’ nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.”

Here’s detail from the study, showing one trick (which some people in the trade may not even realize is a trick) of the trade:

A possibly-fascinating little taxonomy of little fasteners

If you like to classify things, or see classifications of things that other people took the time to do, you might like the work done by the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HOLG). Their focus is perhaps fascinating, and certainly fastener-centric. The HOLG web site explains:

This site contains several years of research in the classification of occlupanids. These small objects are everywhere, dotting supermarket aisles and sidewalks with an impressive array of form and color. The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group has taken on the mantle of classifying this most common, yet most puzzling, member of phylum Plasticae.

Here, a photo from HORG’s variegated collection:

(Thanks to investigator Fluffy for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: “Artificae Plantae: The Taxonomy, Ecology, and Ethnobotany of Simulacraceae“

Shuttlecock aerodynamics: part 3

“The shuttlecock soars upward

In a parabola of whiteness,

Turns,

And sinks to a perfect arc.”

This extract, from one of the few eminent poems to prominently feature shuttlecocks, is by Amy Lawrence Lowell, (Men, Women and Ghosts, A Roxbury Garden,1916) and is quoted in the latest research regarding the aerodynamics of shuttlecocks. A study by Chak Man Chan of the Mechanical Engineering department at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, (advised by professor Jenn Stroud Rossmann), scientifically examined a previously unexamined question : with regard to the shuttlecock skirt, which might be best, feather or plastic?

“In this study, the flight performance of four models of shuttlecocks, two with feather skirts and two with plastic, is investigated. The aerodynamic forces of each shuttlecock at varying air speed and angle of attack are measured in a subsonic wind tunnel. Empirical correlations derived from these data are then incorporated into an adaptive, shuttlecock-specific numerical trajectory simulation.”

Analysis of the simulations and experiments confirmed the preferences of some professional shuttlecock users.

“Results of both aerodynamic testing and trajectory simulation provide quantitative support for players’ preference for the ‘feel’ and responsiveness of feather shuttlecocks.”

The paper: Badminton shuttlecock aerodynamics: synthesizing experiment and theory is published in Sports Engineering, June 2012, Volume 15, Issue 2, pp 61-71.

COMING SOON Shuttlecock aerodynamics : part 4 (with an as yet unresolved puzzle requiring readers’ assistance).

The previous article in this series can be found here.

BONUS A further poetic extract :

“The shuttlecock drops zigzagedly,

Out of orbit,

Hits the path,

And rolls over quite still.

Dead white feathers,

With a weight at the end.”

( The full poem can be read here, courtesy The Project Gutenberg).

 

 

It’s time to watch the human clock video

It’s time to watch the human clock video:

It was created by Edson Oda.