Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 54

New Cutting-Edge Research About Old Saws

The physics of musical saws, explored by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, was profiled in the New York Times:

“Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help explain, mathematically, its beautiful sounds. The report was published April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.”

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

The saw study cites, among other things, distantly related research by Basile Audoly, who won an Ig Nobel Prize for physics in 2006 for work with spaghetti.

Mahadevan was the student of someone (Joe Keller) who won two Igs (for research about tea pot spouts, and ponytails), and he himself was the teacher of someone else (David Hu) who has won two Igs (for research about mammal urination duration, and about the shaping of wombat poo).

Mahadevan himself has been awarded only one Ig, though he has done many other things (this saw work being the latest example) that are deserving.

The New York Times, as per tradition (a tradition it violates about once per decade), protected its readers by not mentioning any of these Ig Nobel Prizes. [Another occasional exception: things like the crossword puzzle. See the May 3 NY Times crossword puzzle, 14 across.]

What Is High-Throughput Word Generation (HTWG)?

If you read the following brief passage, you might invent the question “What Is High-Throughput Word Generation (HTWG)?” The passage is from the paper “It׳s all Greek to me: Towards a broader view of food science and ‘creativity’ in gastronomy,” by Will Goldfarb, in the research journal International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (vol. 2, no. 1, June 2014, pp. 46-50).

The thoughts below concern the creative process in general, as well as the plated dessert in contemporary cooking in specific, with four recent examples. The idea is to contextualize “food science” in “gastronomy” through relationships in the arts and sciences, including, but not limited to: performance art; physics; chemistry; philosophy; and language. The first step in this journey involves an analysis of the creative process in the contemporary kitchen and its methodology.

Five “abstractions” of creativity in the kitchen
An early inspiration from physical science came from Chapter 25 of Einstein׳s general theory of relativity, specifically, the concept of Gaussian coordinates with flexible axes and “fixed” coordinates which reflect a “mathematical treatment of continua” (Einstein, 1961). It recalled the phenomenon of site-specific flavor, where food tastes differently depending on where (Sforza et al., 1994) it is consumed, in practical terms: across a dimension of distance. This so-called “relativity of taste” (Goldfarb, 2005) served as a springboard for the “five levels of creativity in the kitchen”.

 

Ig Nobel Prizes in the NY Times Crossword Puzzle

The Ig Nobel Prizes have again turned up in a crossword puzzle, this time as an answer in the May 3, 2022 puzzle in The New York Times. The clue for one of the across words is:

14 ___ Prize (satirical scientific award since 1991)

By our lazy count, this is the sixth 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 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 the many people who brought it to our attention.)

An Insect Photographer Who Is Scared of Insects

Louise Downham interviews someone who, despite and because of his fear of insects, now specializes in photographing them. The interview is in Fstoppers, a publication for readers who purchase photographic equipment. The interview begins:

Terrified of creepy crawlies he may be, but Mofeed Abu-Shalwa has committed his career to photographing and researching tiny creatures. I interviewed him to find out more about his incredible, jewel-like, and award-winning photographs — and how he got over his fear….

New Scientist magazine did a profile of Mofeed Abu-Shalway and the image that brought him acclaim as Luminar Bug Photographer of the Year 2020.

The subject matter may bring thrills and chills to a related group of people: entomologists who are scared of spiders (which, of course, are not insects but are, according to most nontechnical definitions, bugs). Those people were, in a way, honored by the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for entomology.

(Thanks to Bruce Petschek for bringing this to our attention.)

The Scholar of Wet Floor Signs

The scholars of wet floor signs commit scholarship to studying wet floor signs. Their web site displays pictograms, photos, and photo-realizations of many signs pertaining to wet floors.

They are led by Elena Kamas, at Stanford University.

(Thanks to Anna Beukenhorst for bringing this to our attention.)

The special Women (and Men) issue of the magazine

Volume 20, number 4 of the magazine is a special Women and Men issue. The table of contents, and a few articles, are online. You can, if you are daring, purchase a PDF copy of the entire issue. If you are really daring, subscribe to the magazine.

Podcast Episode #1093: “Why Pedestrians Do Not Constantly Collide”

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time.

In Podcast Episode #1093, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics winners Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi. They received the prize for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.

REFERENCE: “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, 20188.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!

New Book of Pranks Pulled by Scientists

Il Pollo di Marconi (English translation: “Marconi’s Chicken”) is a new book that collects and savors pranks pulled by scientists (and/or their ilk). Journalist Vito Tartamella did the collecting and savoring. The book, which includes Tartamella’s own celebrated discovery of the stealthily published scientific papers by Stronzo Bestiale (English translation: “Total Asshole”), is in Italian.

Tartamella describes the book in an essay in the Italian news site Focus, and also, in English, in this note to us:

It’s the first historical essay about pranks made by scientists in the last century and over. For the first time I collected 110 pranks made by Nobel prize winners (Guglielmo Marconi, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, Andre Geim), and other celebrities such as Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Richard Branson, Enrico Bombieri, Thomas Edison, Isaac Asimov (when he was doing his doctorate in chemistry at the university).  I discovered that research institutions such as NASA, CERN, FermiLab, journals like Science, Nature, British Medical Journal, Scientific American, museums and laboratories all over the world had concocted sensational jokes in the last 150 years.

Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer

“Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer” [by Philippe Bourrianne, Paul R. Kaneelil, Manouk Abkarian, and Howard A. Stone, Physical Review Fluids, vol. 6, no. 11, 2021] is one of the studies featured in “Viruses Research Review: Group Sex, Singer, Saint, Count“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research.

Frozen Meat and the Guerrilla War Against Misinformation

“Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations” [by Ekaterina Bogomoletc and Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 118-125.] is a featured study in “Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research.